On Wednesday morning a man in the region Skåne received one of the worst messages a father could get. 

His partner had texted him saying that their nine-year-old daughter had gone missing on the train between Malmö and Ystad while the mother had gone to the toilet.

Panicked, the man rang the woman on her phone, but got no answer.

At around 9am on Wednesday morning, the frantic father rang Skåne police to report his daughter’s disappearance.

Eventually he managed to get hold of his girlfriend who then informed him that it was all an April Fools' prank, saying that “they usually joke with each other in this way”.

Speaking after the incident, Martin Carlsson, duty officer at Skåne Police in Malmö, said that they did not send out any officers because they did not know where the girl had disappeared.

“But we do take all such alarms seriously, and it’s in cases like this that the first few minutes are the most important,” Carlsson told local paper Helsingborgs Dagblad.

The woman was not suspected of any crime as no police were sent to the scene.

“April Fools’ should be fun. This was bad judgement,” Carlsson added.

This particular prank may not have been particularly clever – or funny – but there were plenty of April Fools' jokes that did manage to raise a few laughs in Sweden.

On Wednesday the Swedish media was awash with April Fools' pranks – including The Local Sweden itself. 

In Luleå readers were no doubt overjoyed to read that an Ica supermarket in the town would be the first in the country to experiment with selling British gin, despite the fact that – with the exception of a few low-alcohol beers and ciders – supermarkets are barred from selling alcohol in Sweden.

And up in the far north, Nyheter24 suggested that Sweden's Ice Hotel was being renamed to avoid confusion with the militant Islamist group Isis, also known as IS.

Meanwhile, here at The Local we reported that the way Swedes say 'no' is slightly different in one isolated town in the south of the country, where many Vikings settled in the 10th century after returning from Scotland.