Young migrants ‘groped girls as young as 12 at Swedish festival’
MORE than 20 girls aged between 12 and 18 have complained of being sexually assaulted by youths thought to be asylum seekers at a Swedish music festival.
Some of the alleged victims reported scenes similar to the mass sex attacks in Germany on New Year’s Eve, when more than 1,000 women were assaulted in Cologne and other cities by gangs from North Africa and Syria.
The attacks reported in Sweden happened during the Party In The Park in Karlstad, 250 miles from Stockholm, over the weekend.
One girl waived her right to anonymity yesterday to describe how she was groped by boys standing behind her on Friday.
Alexandra Larsson, 17, said: ‘Things got out of hand at midnight.
‘Everyone around us behaved really badly and my friends told a couple of boys to quieten down. They were threatened by the boys who said, “You will die, bitch”.’
‘But the verbal abuse was just beginning. It would become much worse.’
Miss Larsson said when her group of friends tried to walk away, she felt a hand on her behind, adding: ‘ Someone took the liberty of grabbing my butt really hard.
‘I said to the group of boys behind us that this was not OK, but I did not know who had done it. After a while, I felt someone running his fingers between my legs. Luckily, I had jeans on.’
When she turned around again and told the group of young men to stop what they were doing, they all denied touching her.
She said: ‘I screamed right out, “Whoever it was – you’re a pig!”. Me and my girlfriends decided to leave the concert. It was creepy. Someone groped me and I had no idea who it was. It was sick.’
She said the groping started off as ‘something that you can do by mistake in a big crowd of people’ before becoming more aggressive.
Miss Larsson added: ‘Those standing behind me were not from a Swedish background. They were probably immigrants. I hate to say it, but it is the truth.’
Alexandra said a friend aged just 15 suffered a similar ordeal, adding: ‘A bunch of teenagers grabbed her bottom, breasts and genitals. I could see crying girls everywhere around me when I left the festival.’ Another girl said: ‘I was dancing when a guy came from behind and held me down and started humping against my body. It was horrible.’
Seven males have been arrested, Swedish police said yesterday – six of them boys from a nearby refugee centre for unaccompanied children. The seventh was a drunk 35year-old Swede.
About 20,000 music fans – mainly teenagers – visited the free three- day festival headlined by the Eighties rock band Europe.
Chief Inspector Urban Bengtsson, who was in charge of policing the festival, said: ‘We have at least 28 notified reports of sexual molestation – mainly very young women aged 12 to 18 years.
‘But there could be more coming in over the next couple of days. There are probably a lot of unrecorded cases. The place was really packed.
‘We had loads of reports on Friday and Saturday, and it seems to be happening during the last concerts every night.
‘The girls said that the ones groping are immigrants. The common denominator among the suspects is that they are staying at homes for unaccompanied refugee children.’ ÷ German police have warned of a ‘surge in sex crimes’ by migrants at public swimming baths, the newspaper Bild reported. A police document said: ‘Rape and the sexual abuse of children in bathing establishments have given us grave cause for concern. The perpetrators are, for the most part, immigrants.’
‘I was held down. It was horrible’