Pt-media is often criticized for highlighting only crimes committed by foreigners. That is not the case. We will present things as fairly as possible. Even the following story is based on Swedish speaking youngsters.
30th November last year, about twenty Swedish teenagers were having a sporty evening at a Stockholm school. So it was completely an insider or friend circle thing. Closing the end of the evening, the participants decided to joke a little, i.e. in Swedish: skoja. At the time of writing, all students were 16-year-olds.
The teenagers gathered in the middle of the gym and did a collective “seppolehto” or “salute”. In other words, they took a lively, playful swing-of-an-arm each. In addition, most of them placed the front and middle fingers of the left hand in front of the mouth as “Hitler mustache”. Then, a group selfie was shot and shared into a closed Snapchat group with just under 100 followers. The joke made them laugh for a couple of days. (See the above picture)
Then they got a reason to cry.
Namely, someone had taken a screenshot of the Snapchat status update and showed it to the school principal. Of course, the Rector, as a law-abiding person, made a proper report to the police, and the receiving police duly considered it to be a crime. An obvious agitation.
14 young people were called to interrogation on suspicion of stirring up hatred towards a group of people. All students admitted that they had been involved in the incident and that the description was correct. But it was denied that there was any agitation towards a group of people. Some said that they were only part of the greeting as a joke because others did the same. Some said it was an inside joke and some said they could not even understand why such a joke was a crime. However, prosecutor Eugene Alm has taken the hard line and told the Swedish media:
– The general rule is that it is no defense to say that they did not know the act was illegal.
Jokes or not, stirring up hatred against a group of people is a serious matter. So the prosecutor decided to prosecute the 13 students shown in the picture. The 14th, that is, the photographer, was also charged. That is, even if he did not even “greet”. Just took a picture.
The case will soon go up to the Stockholm District Court, where the criminal juveniles will be charged with agitation against an ethnic group. We will monitor the situation and review the verdict.
