SHARE
COPY LINK

POLICE

Swede appointed to head UN police force

Swedish police officer Ann-Marie Orler has been appointed as the United Nation's top cop.

UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon told reporters on Monday that Orler, currently a deputy police adviser to the UN department of peacekeeping operations, would be promoted to the top police post.

“She has been the UN deputy police adviser since 2008 and has led a global effort to recruit more female police officers for UN peace operations,” the secretary-general said.

“Now the United Nations’ top cop is a woman. That is a wonderful way to celebrate International Women’s Day,” he added.

Orler, who has more than two decades of police experience, will be in charge of 12,867 police officers from 90 nations serving in 15 UN peacekeeping missions around the world.

She has previously served as secretary-general of Amnesty International in her

native Sweden, where she also was police commissioner in the county of Västmanland.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

POLICE

Denmark convicts man over bomb joke at airport

A Danish court on Thursday gave a two-month suspended prison sentence to a 31-year-old Swede for making a joke about a bomb at Copenhagen's airport this summer.

Denmark convicts man over bomb joke at airport

In late July, Pontus Wiklund, a handball coach who was accompanying his team to an international competition, said when asked by an airport agent that
a bag of balls he was checking in contained a bomb.

“We think you must have realised that it is more than likely that if you say the word ‘bomb’ in response to what you have in your bag, it will be perceived as a threat,” the judge told Wiklund, according to broadcaster TV2, which was present at the hearing.

The airport terminal was temporarily evacuated, and the coach arrested. He later apologised on his club’s website.

“I completely lost my judgement for a short time and made a joke about something you really shouldn’t joke about, especially in that place,” he said in a statement.

According to the public prosecutor, the fact that Wiklund was joking, as his lawyer noted, did not constitute a mitigating circumstance.

“This is not something we regard with humour in the Danish legal system,” prosecutor Christian Brynning Petersen told the court.

SHOW COMMENTS