'Innocent refugees arrested by border police'

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

advertisements

The Swedish border police have come in for criticism for questionable practices to beef up statistics including arresting innocent asylum seeking children and falsifying testimony.

A complaint filed by border police whistleblowers with internal affairs revealed that refugees were being arrested for crimes they hadn't committed, the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper reported.

Some of those arrested were children who were then held without any legal basis.

The report adds that border police management urged officers to circumvent regulations in order to reach the quantitative target on the number of registered crimes.

"They have started to do it to increase the stats and get more numbers," one officer told DN.

According to the report hundreds of refugees have been affected by the tactics.

On one occasion, a 14-year-old girl was held on suspicion of having false documents and was locked up. Several police officers reacted strongly to this but the officer responsible insisted she should be arrested.

"There was no mistaking that she was a child but it did not bother the man," a police officer told Aftonbladet.

The report also referred to a case of 16-year-old boy from Somalia who was held for having a suspected fake ID. The prosecutor told the police the boy's real name and age and said not to arrest him.

However, the police made a new request using the boy's false documents which gave him the age of 18 and he was subsequently arrested. Border police altered the minutes of the police logs to make it look like the boy had declared his false identity.

Despite the findings, a fresh probe of border police procedure is unlikely according to prosecutor Håkan Roswall who said he saw "nothing" in the report that warrants further investigation.

Home
Email

Hiiraan Online