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POLICE

Two drown after high-speed police chase

Two suspected petrol thieves have died after a high-speed police chase on Monday night ended with them driving their car off a bridge that was open for boat traffic, and into the icy waters below.

Two drown after high-speed police chase

The owner of a petrol station in Uppsala, eastern Sweden, called police to report a vehicle had left without paying.

Police subsequently took up the chase after spotting the car on a highway soon after midnight.

The two people, whose identities and gender remain unknown, led the police at high speed through Enköping and further south towards Strängnäs – about 30 kilometres west of Stockholm.

In an effort to stop the thieves, police called ahead to operators at the Hjulstabron bridge, a 520 metre long drawbridge, and demanded it was open as if a boat was passing.

But the thieves either didn't slow down in time, or decided to crash through the barricades in an escape effort, and then drove off the open bridge and into the icy water below.

The bodies of the two thieves were found by divers in the early hours of Tuesday morning. They were stuck inside their car and had drowned.

By Tuesday morning, the car had been removed from the waters of the Hjulstafjärden and the bridge was opened to traffic again.

TT/The Local/og

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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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