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POLICE

Five year sentence for Swede’s child sex crimes

45-year-old Swede Patrick Johnsson who had more than half a million images of child pornography, including some featuring infants, has been jailed for five years for child pornography crimes and child rape.

When police confiscated Johnsson’s computer, they found 514,216 images as well as 10,239 films featuring child pornography, according to the Aftonbladet newspaper

Some of the material included documented cases of the rape of an infant.

Johnsson was also facing charges for sexually abusing four children in the Philippines in 2010.

On Tuesday the 45-year-old was convicted of aggravated pornography crimes, child rape, aggravated exploitation of a child for sexual posing, as well as conspiring to commit child rape by the Kristianstad District Court in southern Sweden.

Johnsson, from Skåne, in southern Sweden, was arrested in February on suspicion of child pornography crimes.

He was discovered after an American raid against an internet site for child pornography, as police discovered that the Swedish man was a frequent visitor of the site.

When police began to look into the case, they uncovered that he had also abused young children in the Philippines.

He was convicted of abusing four children in the Philippines, between the ages of 4 and 15, on visits to the country in 2010.

According to AFP, Johnsson had already purchased a flight back to the Philippines, and online chat records indicated that he intended to sexually assault more children.

This is the third case in which someone in Sweden has been sentenced for child abuse crimes committed in another country.

“This is a very strong signal we’re sending. Just because the crimes weren’t committed in Sweden, we can still arrest a suspected paedophile, and then charge them with the crimes,” said criminal inspector Björn Sellström of the National Bureau of Investigation (Rikskriminalen) to national Sveriges Television (SVT).

Helena Karlén, chairwoman of the organisation Ecpat, is pleased that politicians and police authorities are beginning to take this type of child abuse abroad seriously.

“It’s important that the public are made aware of these crimes, and that people know that abuse on the other end of the globe can lead to a conviction back home in Sweden,” she told TT.

“The media’s attention on these cases is positive. It can act as a deterrant.”

The 45-year-old has denied all charges against him except the pornography crimes.

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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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