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Policemen cleared of assaulting whistleblower

Two police officers have been cleared of assault in a case that attracted widespread attention after a blogger used techniques worthy of a Stieg Larsson plot to restore photographs and video footage that he claimed the officers had forced him to delete.

Stockholm District Court dismissed the charges against the officers on Friday, clearing them of any wrongdoing after they ordered the blogger, Jesper Nilsson, to delete photos taken at the Hornstull metro station after he spotted the men roughing up two youths travelling without a valid ticket.

According to the indictment, the officers had threatened to report him on harassment and drugs charges if he did not remove the pictures from his mobile phone. He agreed to erase the images.

Nilsson’s version of events seemed “more logical and credible” than that of the policemen, said the court, but added there was no proof of coercion since the recording had stopped at that point.

The officers also pressed Nilsson up against a wall and snatched his mobile phone from him.

In its ruling, the court argued that the violence used was of a very minor nature and had not caused injury to Nilsson. What’s more, the officers immediately returned his phone.

Nilsson said he was not surprised by the outcome, but added that his video footage meant there would rarely be a clearer case for convicting officers of the law.

“This kind of verdict leads to increased (public) resignation,” he told news agency TT.

He said the only way to secure a conviction would be to record an entire incident from start to finish.

“Ever second of what happens has to be filmed.”

Writing on his blog after the incident, Nilsson explained how he went home and quickly began “setting up a little crime laboratory” in an attempt to restore the images.

After hooking up his smartphone to his computer, he was soon able to retrieve a raw copy of the phone’s hard disk.

“After several hours of hard work, a few cups of coffee and some swearing, I had restored my telephone’s image bank,” he wrote.

Recovering the deleted video footage proved more difficult, but help was at hand. He sent the corrupted file to “some clever girls and guys” in Spain and soon received an email confirming that they had succeeded in reconstructing the three-minute movie.

The event became notorious after Nilsson uploaded the film to social media website YouTube.

A prosecutor charged the two policemen with harassment, arbitrary conduct and unlawful restraint or misconduct, as Nilsson tried to expose what he believed to be the use of undue force by the officers.

Following the incident, the policemen reported Nilsson for aggravated defamation, harassment and assaulting a police officer, but the allegations did not lead to any criminal charges against the blogger.

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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.

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