‘Anger’ tests tolerance

Sweden bracing for hate crimes

STOCKHOLM, April 13, (RTRS): Hours after the truck attack that killed four people in the heart of Stockholm, Muslim taxi driver Abdi Dahir found himself in a suffocating choke-hold from a man sitting in the back seat.

Struggling to breathe, Dahir, who moved to Sweden from Somalia as a child, felt he could die too, at the hands of an angry passenger who blamed the country’s openness to Muslim immigrants for the attack that afternoon.

“We have done everything for everyone, we have given them mosques, we have given them everything but they kill our own people. Then we’ll kill them,” the man growled at Dahir before grabbing him around the neck, according to an audio recording of the assault.

Dahir, who recorded part of the conversation on his cellphone, said he had also activated a concealed alarm, prompting police to intervene. Stockholm police said they were investigating the incident.

“I tried to work, but I’m too nervous to have anyone sitting behind me in the car,” said Dahir, his voice still hoarse.

Anti-Muslim anger is putting the Nordic country’s deep-rooted liberal traditions to the test, after a man hijacked a beer truck and rammed it into a busy downtown pedestrian mall.

At the time of the attack, the suspect, 39-year-old Rakhmat Akilov from Uzbekistan, had applied for asylum

months of bad blood between them and the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party.

A snap election followed on March 2, which boosted Sinn Fein and saw unionists lose their outright majority in the Belfast assembly, though the DUP narrowly remained the largest party.

Prince Charles

Brokenshire

but had been rejected and faced an expulsion order, making him one of more than 12,000 people wanted for deportation in Sweden. In court on Tuesday his lawyer said he had confessed to a terrorist crime.

Europe’s most welcoming nation to asylum seekers has tightened immigration policy in recent years and is considering new measures after Friday’s attack, including better policing of deportation orders and banning membership of terrorist groups.

It is also bracing for rising intolerance and hate crimes.

“I’m quite worried about the political climate,” said Mohamed Nuur, 25, a local politician from the ruling Social Democrat party who represents constituents in Rinkeby, a sprawling area of apartment blocks largely planned and built for workers in Sweden’s progressive heyday of the late 1960s.

It is part of a belt of heavily immigrant neighbourhoods that ring Stockholm. Drab grey terrace houses line the streets where small shops advertise halal products in both Arabic and Swedish. Many women there wear head scarves when they go out.

“We already see manipulated images spread by Nazis and others who want to spread hateful messages,” said Nuur, a Muslim of Somali decent.

Rinkeby has seen trouble such as riots among disaffected youths, but it looks well kept compared to many of the more run-down areas around major cities in Europe.

An initial three-week deadline for Sinn Fein and the DUP to resolve their differences passed with no resolution and the British government granted more time, though that time is now running out.

“The current phase of round-table talks over the past 10 days to help resolve issues will pause for Easter,” Britain’s Northern Ireland minister James Brokenshire said in a statement. (AFP)

‘FB failed to remove posts’:

Facebook failed to remove dozens of instances of extremist and child pornography even after the social network’s moderators were directly informed of the potentially illegal content, an investigation by The Times showed on Thursday.

Using a fake profile set up last month, a Times journalist found images and videos