STOCKHOLM: More than a dozen cars were torched and schools, shops and a police station were set ablaze as riots swept through Stockholm’s immigrant-dominated suburbs for the fifth straight night, police and firefighters said yesterday.
Police plan to call in reinforcements to help quell the riots, but parents and volunteer organisations who have patrolled the streets in recent nights have helped decrease their intensity, police spokesman Kjell Lindgren said.
The riots have shattered Sweden’s image abroad as a peaceful and egalitarian nation, and sparked a domestic debate about the assimilation of immigrants, who make up about 15 percent of the population.
Firefighters were dispatched to 70 different locations in greater Stockholm overnight, extinguishing torched cars, dumpsters and buildings, including three schools, the fire department wrote on Twitter.
That was calmer than the previous night, when they handled 90 incidents.
Lindgren said 13 people had been arrested, between the ages of 17 and 26, but no injuries were reported.
One of the rioters in the suburb of Husby told Swedish Radio that racism was rampant where he lived, and that violence was his only way of being noticed.
“We burned cars, threw rocks at police, at police cars. But it’s good, because now people know what Husby is... This is the only way to be heard,” said the rioter, identified only by the pseudonym Kim.
In Rinkeby, one of the city’s immigrant-dominated areas, six cars parked alongside each other were torched, according to a photographer on the scene.
A police station and several shops in Aelvsjoe were set on fire, but the flames were quickly extinguished.
Firefighters said a fire set at a school in another immigrant-heavy suburb, Tensta, was quickly extinguished, as was another at a nursery school in the Kista suburb. And police in Soedertaelje, a town south of Stockholm, said rioters threw stones at them as they responded to reports of cars set alight.
AFP
