Swedish prime minister reveals 'great anger' over reports of sex attacks

Stefan Löfven speaks out after boy charged with assault at festival and police accused of withholding information about attacks

                                    Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven (right): ‘Those guilty must be punished.’

Sweden’s prime minister has said he feels “a great anger” over reports of a string of sex assaults at a teenage music festival, widely likened to similar attacks blamed on male refugees in Germany.

A 15-year-old boy has been charged with assault and sexual assault at the We Are Stockholm festival after police were accused of withholding information about a number of attacks. It has emerged that a total of 38 reports of rape and sexual assault were filed after the festival in 2014 and 2015.

The prime minister, Stefan Löfven, told Swedish lawmakers on Wednesday that girls and women should be able to move around freely at night without fear of being assaulted, but did not blame the attacks on refugees.

“If assaults occur, society has to stand with the victims,” he said. “I felt a great anger as I learned about the reports from both Cologne and Stockholm. Those guilty must be punished.”

Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the rightwing anti-immigration party Sweden Democrats, pressed the prime minister to comment on whether cultural differences played a part in the attacks, given that police have said suspects were described as foreigners.

“Whatever the motive we have to work more with attitudes among young men,” Löfven said. “It’s never OK to grope or harass women.”

Internal police memos obtained by the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter referred to “so-called refugee youths, specifically from Afghanistan”. The national police commissioner, Dan Eliasson, has promised a full investigation into the events at the festival.

Sweden Democrats have accused police of timidity over the cultural background of the attackers. “If they [the police] have taken any political stand in what they are reporting then obviously that’s completely devastating,” Paula Bieler, the party’s spokeswoman for integration and equality for women told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“This is a new scale, it comes from a completely different view of women than we have in our country. We now have a huge inflow of young men from countries with a completely different view of women, from wars where we know that rape and sexual harassment is a way of relaxing … and also from the countries where they have a very patriarchal, Islamist culture where women are respected if they stay at home but not if they are in public.”

Bieler called for an educational programme for refugees to teach them about Swedish values. “We have said that those who don’t want to accept it, if you want to bring your old values of women only being there for men’s sake, then that view is not welcome here in and in that case neither are you,” she said.