Swedish court convicts 15-year-old who carried semi-automatic to Israeli embassy

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — A Swedish court finds a 15-year-old boy guilty of possession of a semi-automatic weapon while heading to the Israeli embassy in Stockholm in a taxi.

The conviction comes less than a month after Sweden’s intelligence agency accused Iran of recruiting gang members to attack Israeli interests in the Scandinavian country.

The boy was arrested on May 16 when police stopped a taxi in the Tyreso suburb south of Stockholm, en route to the Israeli embassy in the capital. He was carrying the gun in his jacket.

The following night, a 14-year-old boy was arrested after a shooting near the Israeli embassy. That investigation is still underway.

The 15-year-old, who is sentenced to 11 months of juvenile supervision, told the Nacka district court he had been ordered to pick up an item in Tyreso for delivery, according to the verdict obtained by AFP.

He said he thought he would collect drugs and only discovered it would be a gun on the way to pick up the item.

He said he found out he was going to the Israeli embassy when he got in the taxi, which a woman had ordered for him.

The taxi driver confirmed that a woman, whose identity has not been established, gave the driver the embassy address.

The teen told the court he felt tricked, but still went ahead with the assignment.

Prosecutors presented evidence from the boy’s smartphone showing that he had looked up the route to the embassy, and the court ruled the youth “knew that the trip was going to the embassy even if he was unable to give the taxi driver an address.”

The fact that the weapon was discovered en route to the embassy meant “the weapon typically could be feared to be used criminally,” the court says.

However, it emphasizes that there was “no investigation in the case about what was actually planned to happen” that night. It was not known why the police stopped the taxi.