Just two days after President Trump incorrectly claimed that a major terror attack occurred in Sweden, rioters from an immigrant suburb of Stockholm torched cars and threw rocks at the cops.
Swedish police arrested a suspect on a drug charge near their Rinkeby station Monday night, which prompted a gang of thugs to stage a four-hour riot, looting businesses as well as burning multiple vehicles.
Police said one “officer was hit in the arm and slightly injured.” and that cops fired warning shots to disperse the crowd. No further arrests were made.
“Nobody has been found injured at the scene and we have checked the hospitals and there hasn’t been anyone with what could be gunshot wounds,” police spokesman Lars Bystrom said.
But a photographer from media outlet Dagens Nyheter said a group of 15 people beat him as he documented the violence.
“I was hit with a lot of punches and kicks both to my body and my head. I have spent the night in hospital,” said the unnamed photographer, Fox News reported.
The neighborhood in question is heavily populated by Muslims, most of them immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East.
The neighborhood, Rinkeby, had also been the scene of riots in 2010 and 2013.
At a rally in Florida on Saturday, Trump lamented violence and unrest in Europe caused by an influx of Muslim immigrants.
“You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?” he said in a remark widely mocked in Sweden and by his domestic foes.
The president later said he was referring to a report on Fox News he saw Friday claiming that crime and violence had spiked in the Nordic country — a claim denied by the Swedish police.
“It’s very judgmental,” said Nicklas Lund, a spokesman for the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, which researches the country’s crime data, according to ABC News.
Sweden has 15 suburbs with high crime rates, Lund said, and Rinkeby is one of those suburbs.
The council said the number of reported crimes in those 15 areas decreased in 2015 — to 19,092 from 19,576 in 2014.
In 2012 the number of reported crimes in the suburbs was over 20,200.
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