Swedish Police Accused Of Covering Up Sexual Assaults At Music Festival

Swedish police are under fire for allegedly covering up sexual assaults by migrant teens at the music festival We Are Stockholm, Europe's largest youth festival. The alleged incidents took place in the summer of 2014.

According to internal documents obtained by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, a number of teenage girls were

"These are so-called refugee youths, specifically from Afghanistan. Several of the gang were arrested for sexual molestation," one police memo said.

"As soon as you came out in the crowd, they began to grope," a 15-year-old girl told Dagens Nyheter.

However, the official police report on the five-day festival with 170,000 people aged mainly 13-19 made no mention of any sexual assault or harassment, which is odd for a gathering of that size.

The following year in 2015 without any sort of alleged police cover-up, there were 20 sexual assaults reported, but no clear linkage between ethnicity and assault was established.

A spokesperson for the festival organizers told The Guardian, "We have seen different waves of this sort of violence over time. Sexual harassment is something that happens in society, so everything that is happening in society will definitely happen there."

The revelations of these assaults the resulting alleged police cover up comes at a very tense time in Sweden and across Europe with migrants entering from the Middle East, notably Libya, Syria and Iraq. Germany has been rocked by accusations that hundreds of women were assaulted in Cologne by apparent Middle Eastern and African descent during New Year's Eve celebrations.

According to Roger Ticoalu, head of events at the Stockholm city administration, organizers had picked up on rumors of assaults in 2014, but didn't have enough facts to act on at the time.

"It was a modus operandi that we had never seen before: large groups of young men who surround girls and molest them," Ticoalu said. "In the cases where we were able to apprehend suspects, they were with a foreign background, newly arrived refugees aged 17-20, who had come to Sweden without their families."

More worrisome is that the police don't have an explanation as to why they didn't report the assaults. "Why it did not happen I do not know," says Press Chief Wolf Gyllander to Dagens Nyhete.

Police have been accused of not being forthcoming with these assaults to not feed into the far-right, anti-immigration party of Sweden, the Sweden Democrats' rhetoric.

Stay tuned for more developments as this story.