Swedish police cover up mass sexual molestations: report

Sweden's prime minister on Monday slammed local police after officers were accused of covering up mass molestations during two music festivals in Stockholm, local media reported.

Stefan Lofven said the victims had been doubly betrayed through the incident after two consecutive yearly editions of a music festival yielded scores of molestation incidents and alleged cover-ups by the police.

"One (betrayal) is that crimes have not been investigated and the other is that the police have not informed (the public) about it," Lofven told news agency TT.

Young migrant children, many of whom had come to Sweden without their parents, harassed female festivalgoers two years in a row, in the summers of 2014 and 2015, according to an investigation by daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Rather than report the molestations at last year's edition of the festival, police focused their efforts on relocating the perpetrators and comforting the victims, resulting in fewer complaints than would otherwise have been the case, the paper reported.

When summarizing disorderly incidents during last year's We Are Sthlm festival, police failed to mention the harassment in their statement, writing instead that "relatively few crimes and arrests" had been made, Dagens nyheter reported.

"We should absolutely have written and told people about this, without doubt. Why it did not happen, I do not know," chief police spokesperson Varg Gyllander told the newspaper.

Prime Minister Lofven said he "felt strong anger" at the fact that the women could not "attend a music festival without being violated."

"This is a very big problem for those affected and for our whole country," Lofven told TT. Endit