Swedish police accused of covering up sex crimes by Muslim migrants

Swedish police face allegations of a cover-up Monday for failing to inform the public of widespread sexual assaults against teenage girls at a music festival last summer by purported “young men who are not from Sweden” — an apparent euphemism for migrants from the Muslim world.

Police hadn’t mentioned the August incidents at the “We are Sthlm” festival until newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported on them this weekend following a string of sexual assaults and robberies on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany.

Stockholm police spokesman Varg Gyllander confirms to The Associated Press on Monday there was “a large number” of sexual assaults during the five-day festival and that scores of suspects were detained.

He says police should have reported on the incidents at the time “given the nature of the crime.” He denies suggestions in the newspaper report that police kept quiet because the suspects were foreigners.

“We probably should have communicated this,” Gyllander tells the AP. “But we wouldn’t have discussed ethnicity at all.”

Police in Germany have been criticized for not immediately reporting the incidents in Cologne, where authorities and witnesses later described the attackers as predominantly Arab and North African men.

Gyllander couldn’t confirm the ethnicity of the alleged attackers in Stockholm but said “this involves young men who are not from Sweden.”

Roger Ticoalu, who heads the city government’s events department, tells the AP that a “large part” of those detained were from Afghanistan, many carrying temporary ID cards issued to asylum seekers.

— Agencies