A Swedish court dropped public endangerment charges against a teen who was caught with a large bomb in his backpack which he claimed he had thought were drugs at the time.
Police arrested the teen, then 18-years-old, in July on a train headed for Stockholm and found a gun and 1.5 kilograms of explosive material in a can in his backpack, roughly the same amount of explosive used in the deadly London 2005 bombings, Swedish broadcaster SVT reports.
According to investigators, the 19-year-old, who lives in the migrant-majority municipality of Södertälje, was sent down to the multicultural southern city of Malmö to collect items as payments for drug debts, stating that he had been threatened.
‘What’s Going On?’ – BBC Wakes Up to Sweden Bombing Epidemic Years After Breitbart https://t.co/3snOCjhI9r
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) November 13, 2019
The teen told investigators that he thought the backpack had been filled with drugs. Forensic analysis showed that his fingerprints were not on the can containing the explosives, leading to speculation another person packed it into the backpack.
While the charges against the teen were dropped in the case of the bomb, he was convicted of possessing a gun which was linked to a Malmö shooting three years ago and he was sentenced to nine months in prison.
The Swedish Armed Forces released a statement on the incident claiming that the bomb was fully armed and functioning when it was found and that it could have easily exploded while being transported by the teen.
“It was sensitive to impact, shock, friction, and heat. In case of careless handling or an accident it could have detonated,” prosecutor Lotten Paullsson stated.
Multicultural Malmö Sees Three Explosions Within 24 Hours https://t.co/e1hfYegPtC
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) June 13, 2019
Sweden has seen a major increase in explosions linked to gang crime over the past year, with the BBC noting that there were at least 100 explosions by November of 2019.
Ylva Ehrlin, an analyst at Sweden’s National Bomb Guard, commented on the phenomenon in November saying: “We have ten million people in Sweden, but I have not found any equivalent of this level of explosions in any industrialised country.”
Malmö has been a major focus for explosions in 2019, with the city seeing no less than three blasts within a span of just 24 hours in June. In October, police disarmed five more explosive devices said to have been placed in thermos-like containers.
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