YOUTH in Stockholm have risen up in anger over the last three days and faced police attacks and racist abuse, following the police shooting and killing of an elderly man earlier this month.
Swedish police arrested eight in the Stockholm suburb of Husby on Tuesday night as young people set fire to a number of cars and state property.
Incidents were reported in at least nine suburbs including Husby, Jakobsberg, Norsborg and Vaarberg.
In Husby, a school and the Husby Gaard cultural centre were set on fire while rubbish bins burned across Stockholm’s western and southern suburbs.
A school was also set alight in the Skaerholmen suburb, and a police station and buildings in central Jakobsberg came under attack.
The riots began in Husby on Sunday, May 19, a week after a 69-year-old man was killed by police in an apartment.
Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt condemned Stockholm’s youth yesterday, claiming to reporters: ‘There is a core, as there often is, of young men who believe in using violence and who believe that this use of violence is above our democratic values and above Swedish law.
‘We’ve had two nights with great unrest, damage, and an intimidating atmosphere in Husby and there is a risk it will continue.
‘We have groups of young men who think that they can and should change society with violence. Let’s be clear: this is not okay. We cannot be ruled by violence.
‘The people of Husby must get their suburb back because the majority want to live in calmness and safety.’
On Sunday night, more than 100 cars were set alight, Swedish media reported.
Police in the deprived, largely immigrant suburb of Husby shot a man dead last week, claiming that he threatened to kill them with a machete.
The founder of a local youth group told Swedish media the riots are a reaction to ‘police brutality’.
More than 80% of Husby’s 12,000 or so inhabitants are from an immigrant background, and most are from Turkey, the Middle East and Somalia.
Local people accused the police of racism.
Rami al-Khamisi, a law student and founder of the youth organisation Megafonen, told the Swedish edition of online newspaper The Local that he had been insulted racially by police. Teenagers, he said, had been called ‘monkeys’.
He said the people are reacting to a ‘growing marginalisation and segregation in Sweden over the past ten, 20 years, from both a class and a race perspective’.