Monday night, just two days after President Trump was mocked for
implying, at his rally, that there was a terror attack in Sweden, riots
broke out in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood in the northern
suburbs of the country's capital, Stockholm. During the evening hundreds
of young people gathered in the center of Rinkeby, well known for its
high concentration of immigrants and people with immigrant ancestry.
For four hours, a massive crowd of immigrants in the
predominantly Muslim region of Rinkeby burned several cars, vandalized
several shops, looted several shops and threw rocks at police
What caused the riot on Monday night was that the Swedish police made an
arrest on a Muslim drug dealer and presses drug charges on him at
about 8 p.m. near the Rinkeby station. For reasons not yet disclosed by
the police, word of the arrest prompted hundreds of youths to gather and
cause mayhem in the city.
Police spokesman Lars Bystrom confirmed to Sweden's Dagens Nyheter
newspaper that an officer fired shots at a rioter but missed. A
photographer for the newspaper was attacked and beaten by more than a
dozen men and his camera was stolen by them.
Bystrom later said that a police officer was slightly injured and that
one person was arrested for throwing rocks, news agencies reported. Some
civilians were also assaulted while trying to stop looters, he said.
In June 2010, Rinkeby was the scene of riots and attacks against the
local police station and Rinkeby is the region in which the ’60 Minutes’
crew were attacked in 2016.
The problems Sweden faces integrating large numbers of Muslim immigrants
is a subject on which Nordstjernan columnist Ulf Nilson has written
many times. His warnings of increasing radicalization among Sweden’s
Muslims – warnings he started to broadcast a decade ago – now seem
eerily prophetic in light of an Associated Press investigation that
found Stockholm to be a breeding ground for jihadists among Swedish
Somalis.
According to the AP report, which first ran Jan. 24, an al-Qaida-linked
group is busy recruiting anti-government fighters among Somali youths
living in Rinkeby. A suburb of Stockholm, Rinkeby has earned the
nickname of “Little Mogadishu” because of the number of Somalis living
there. Rinkeby is also the center of the recruiting efforts of
al-Shabab, a group with ties to al-Qaida.
Rinkeby is a known problem area in Stockholm. It was here NRK journalist
Anders Magnus was attacked with stones last spring, and here the police
never go in the evenings without reinforcements from other patrols
according to Dabladet.
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