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Man jailed for raping woman in central Malmö

A man who attacked and raped a woman in Malmö has been jailed and banned from returning to Sweden for a decade, after he was caught in Finland and extradited.

Published: 1 April 2019 14:08 CEST
Man jailed for raping woman in central Malmö
The man filmed running across the Bergsgatan street. Photo: Police

The woman reported to police in November last year that the man, whom she had never before met, had approached her shortly after 2am at the Möllevången square in southern Sweden's largest city.

He followed her and kept touching her even though she tried to reject his advances, then raped her.

On Monday, Malmö District Court found a 37-year-old Tunisian man guilty of rape and sentenced him to two and a half years in jail, after which he is to be deported with a ten-year ban on returning to Sweden.

The man was identified with the help of witness statements after police released security camera footage which showed him approaching the woman, and later running from the scene.

But before he could be caught, he fled to Finland where he sought asylum. He was however arrested under a Nordic arrest warrant, and returned to Sweden on January 10th.


Police investigating the morning after the rape. Photo: Johan Nilsson/TT

The man admitted to the court that he had been involved in sexual acts with the woman, but said that she had participated voluntarily. However, the district court found it had been proven that the woman was raped against her will and that the man had realized this, according to the judgment seen by The Local.

The court said it had been confirmed that the man “performed anal intercourse and inserted his fingers into the plaintiff's vagina. These acts are comparable to sexual intercourse with regard to the seriousness of the violation and should therefore be classified as rape”.

It also ordered him to pay 115,000 kronor ($12,400) in damages to the woman.

Malmö last year saw the lowest number of crimes reported in the city for the past 17 years, with the exception of rape. A total of 234 rapes were reported to the police in the municipality in 2018 according to figures by Sweden's National Council for Crime Prevention, an increase from 207 incidents the year before.

A spate of four reports of outdoor gang rapes in late 2017 in particular grabbed international headlines last year, but two of those cases turned out to be false alarms with one woman fined for lying about the incident.

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CRIME

Tech giants promise ‘action plan’ on stopping Nordic gangs using apps for crime

The tech giants Google, Meta, Snapchat and TikTok have pledged to give details "within months" on how they will prevent gang leaders in Nordic countries using their products to carry out serious crimes, Denmark's justice minister said on Friday.

Published: 20 September 2024 16:11 CEST
Tech giants promise 'action plan' on stopping Nordic gangs using apps for crime

After meeting the companies along with other Nordic Justice Ministers in Uppsala, Sweden, Hummelgaard and Swedish counterpart Gunnar Strömmer said he now expected the companies to submit an “action plan” to crack down on the use of their apps to recruit young people to carry our shootings and commit other crimes. 

“I would like it to contain concrete steps on how to use the technology on the platforms to remove and screen content that helps to facilitate organised crime to a greater extent,” Hummelgaard said, while Strömmer said that although he was pleased an important step had been taken it “remains to be seen” how seriously the companies take the issue. 

READ ALSO: Danish gangs’ use of Swedish child hitmen is now a diplomatic issue

Ministers from Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland met to discuss gang crime, which in recent months has increasingly been shown to cross national borders, with criminals from Sweden travelling to Denmark to carry out shootings and hand grenade attacks.

According to Hummelgaard, there have been “many examples” of gangs using social media and encrypted messaging services to plan serious crimes and recruit new criminals, with lists of the payments available for carrying out various criminal services  found circulating  on social media. 

“The way I see it, political patience is about to run out, not just in the Nordic countries, but in large parts of the Western world,” Hummelgaard said.

He said the four companies had made “a really good first step” in pledging to establish a “joint Nordic cooperation forum”, where they would exchange experience and share information with each other about the use of their products in the region for crime. But he said he wanted them to be “more concrete than that”. 

READ ALSO: Nordic justice ministers meet tech giants on gangs hiring ‘child soldiers’

Hummelgaard said that he tech giants had also asked that the police authorities in the Nordic countries to provide information on what kind of “groupings and names” are using their services and how “they communicate”, so that the content can “be removed immediately”. 

“I sense that they have a clear desire and will to cooperate with us. I think that is positive,” he said. “I would also like to say that until today this has not been the experience of many of our law enforcement authorities around the Nordic countries.” 

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