News & comment from Scandinavia

So, the news from Sweden made my eye brows twich today. Apparently a man was spotted walking around the suburb of Stockholm known as Tensta, wearing explosives strapped to his belly.
Worried residents alerted the police who quickly surrounded the man and evacuated the area. It soon transpired that the man was claiming to have been held hostage for the last three days and that unknown persons had strapped a remote controlled bomb to him and turned him loose.

After six hours the police finally managed to release the man from the assumed explosive device. A police spokesperson told the media that the man, a well known petty criminal, was a Norwegian citizen. No motive has yet been advanced though the Swedish media mused with the notion that the man was being punished for having passed on information to the police.

moif: the whole thing was very odd and reminded me of the film 'Swordfish'.
I saw one resident of Tensta, a man of Turkish origin, being interviewed on Swedish TV. He said, he felt that Tensta (which has a huge immigrant Muslim population) was now too dangerous and he was thinking of moving since 'the terrorists had arrived'. It made me laugh since this same sentiment was echoed last year by Nalin Pekgul:
(Translated from the Swedish by me)

"Nalin Pekgul, well-known social democratic advocate of suburbs with a high concentration of immigrants, is leaving her own suburb Tensta because she thinks it has become to insecure. Tensta has become too dangerous for the children, she says. ...

[snip]

The triggering factor was an incident in connection with the Tensta Market earlier this autumn, when a man was hurt by gunshots close to the family's apartment."I was on my way home with my son. There was blood everywhere. It's not funny for an eight-year old to have to see something like that," says Nalin Pekgul. According to rumours, the man survived because he wore a bulletproof vest. A circumstance which also worried Nalin Pekgul."I understood then that many are wearing bulletproof vests here. What has happened here, I wondered. Is this Tensta? I must have missed what has happened here the last years." Link.

To be sure, there isn't very much actually funny about this, but I'm a pessimist at the best of times and its ironic that during the Mo'toons crisis, the Swedish establishment was so free and quick to criticise Denmark.