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Sweden sees rise in reported hate crimes

Xinhua, August 5, 2015 Adjust font size:

Sweden saw a spike in reported hate crimes in 2014, but very few of the police reports have lead to prosecutions.

In 2014, Swedish police received a total of 6,270 reports of hate crimes, representing a 14 percent rise compared to 2013. Police investigations were launched in 59 percent of the cases, but only 5 percent were solved.

One reason for this could be that many hate crimes are committed by unknown persons in public places, according to the National Council for Crime Prevention, which published its latest statistics on hate crimes on Wednesday.

The largest share of the police reports (69 percent) concerned crimes with xenophobic or racist motives. Anti-Christian hate crimes have tripled in Sweden over the past five years and Islamophobic and anti-Semitic crimes are on the rise, too.

However, in 2014 the number of hate crimes concerning sexual orientation were on the same level as in 2013 and have gone down by nearly a fifth over the past five years.

Hate crimes targeting members of religious minorities were mostly directed at women, while men are more likely to be victims of homophobic hate crimes than women. Endit