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POLICE

Stockholm man shot dead by police

Police fatally shot a 69-year-old man in an apartment in north Stockholm on Monday evening after responding to calls that a man armed with a machete was menacing the neighbourhood.

Police were called to an address in the Husby district, north of central Stockholm, around 6pm on Monday following several reports that a knife-wielding man was roaming around the area.

“He had a knife or a machete. When we arrived, this person disappeared into an apartment,” Stockholm police spokesman Lars Byström told the TT news agency.

The man then stood on the balcony of the apartment and threatened police.

“He screamed at police from the balcony that he wanted to kill them,” a neighbour told the Expressen newspaper.

Negotiators were called in and police subsequently learned that a woman was also in the apartment. After negotiations failed to yield any results, police then decided to break down the door and storm the flat in hopes of securing the woman’s safety.

“Then the person in question appeared holding a machete. Officers felt cornered and threw a flash grenade so they could overpower the man. That didn’t work either and they then felt forced to open fire,” said Byström.

It’s unclear how many officers fired shots and exactly how many shots were fired, but according to witnesses, police fired five or six shots before things went silent.

“We saw the flashes when they shot. Even if you’d never sees an actual shooting before, you knew what it was,” a witness told Expressen.

The 69-year-old man was taken to hospital where he was pronounced dead from his gunshot wounds.

The woman in the flat escaped the incident without sustaining any physical injuries, according to police. The woman’s relationship to the man remains unknown.

The incident is now under investigation by prosecutors from the Swedish National Police Crimes Unit (Riksenheten för polismål).

TT/The Local/dl

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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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