Just how old do you think these migrant ‘children’ are?

Alarming pictures that shed light on a growing scandal amid the asylum crisis ...

in November that administrators at the immigration service had been ordered to ‘accept the claim that an applicant is a child if he does not look as if he is over 40’.

And in a leaked interview to a respected Right-leaning Scandinavian newspaper, Dispatch International, a supervisor in a migrants’ hostel had this to say: ‘Many of us are under state orders to keep quiet if we think someone is lying on their asylum application. But, the supervisors here talk to each other about the fact that many of the “children” are in fact adults.’

The crisis has escalated because migrants arriving in Europe throw away their identity papers so they can avoid EU rules which say that if their asylum claim fails they must be returned to the country where they first registered in the EU.

This leaves the politically correct Swedes having to accept the word of ‘child migrants’, because they cannot prove their age claims one way or the other.

Struggling to find beds for the new arrivals, the mayor of Vimmerby, in south-east Sweden, promised to house them in spare rooms in old people’s homes.

This policy, announced last October, was hurriedly reversed ten days ago. Mayor Tomas Peterson said it had been discovered the migrants were not children at all, but ‘ men in their late teens’.

They had, the mayor said, caused ‘serious incidents’ by abusing the old people, throwing furniture and computers out of windows, playing loud music late at night, and showing no respect for the elderly.

A year ago, Swedish television reported that an Afghan claiming to be aged 15 had beaten and threatened staff and other residents at a home for young migrants.

He choked a 14-year-old, pushing his face into a bowl of ice cream and tried to molest female migrants at the same home, scaring some so much that they ran away.

He, of course, is apparently the same age as the Somalian accused of stabbing a woman to death in a migrant hostel this week.

The spate of disturbing incidents has forced Swedish politicians to think again about age testing, although no decision is expected for six months.

OVER in neighbouring Norway, a more robust system of checking migrants’ ages is now in place. Dental examinations — which are reliable indicators of the biological maturity of growing children — revealed nine out of ten ‘underage’ migrants were lying, and turned out to be older than 18.

Meanwhile, the ace sprinter Saad Alsaud is happily settled in the southern Swedish city of Kristianstad.

On his Facebook page, he boasts of his sporting triumphs and gives his birth date as June 1996 — meaning that he is now, apparently, 19 and would have been around 14 when that picture was taken.

But in overwhelmed Sweden, there is no way of proving, one way or the other, if he is telling the truth.

Additional reporting: SAm Greenhill in Sweden