Three Syrian citizens have now been charged and brought to trial for raping an underage girl in Sweden and transmitting child pornography. They are now appearing in Linköping district court for the crime, which was committed in September 2022.
The three suspects, two aged 17 and another one 18, are accused of raping an underage girl in a public toilet at the Garden Association in central Linköping on Sept. 18, but they are only appearing in court now over a year after the incident.
Police say the suspects locked the door and prevented the girl from escaping. All three suspects then raped her in turns, according to Swedish newspaper Nyheter Idag.
Police obtained footage of one of the rapes, which one of the suspects recorded with his smartphone and sent to a contact on Snapchat. This suspect has therefore been also charged with transmitting child pornography.
DNA was also obtained from two of the three suspects when a rape kit was ordered for the young victim.
Since all the suspects were under the age of 18 at the time, they will be charged as juveniles. The suspects also all require an interpreter in Arabic.
They deny that they committed the crime.
Foreigners are vastly overrepresented in rape and gang rape in Sweden, along with other major crimes, which has fueled resentment from the native Swedish population and led to a center-right government being elected on a platform of strict immigration controls.
In 2021, two top academic researchers, Prof. Kristina Sundquist and Prof. Ardavan Khoshnood, were prosecuted for their findings that foreigners commit the vast majority of rapes in the country.
The findings of their study actually align with the same trend found in other reports and studies conducted in the past in Sweden regarding sexual assault and gang rape. Even in other crime areas, such as murder, migrants are vastly over-represented. Such studies have been rare, but until their work, nobody had been threatened with prosecution for conducting scientific research on such topics in Sweden.