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Bus driver’s refugee attack caught on video

UPDATED: A Swedish bus firm has apologized after one of its drivers was caught on camera when he launched an angry tirade at the group of asylum seekers he was driving across the the country.

Bus driver's refugee attack caught on video
A separate group of refugees travelling by bus in Sweden. Photo: Marcus Ericsson/TT

The video, in which you can hear the driver raging at the refugees in English, was captured by one of the passengers on board the bus, which was taking the group from Malmö in southern Sweden to asylum housing in Umeå in the north.

The man was driving the final leg of the journey, a stretch of at least eight hours according to passengers.

The driver furiously explains in English where children are not allowed to sit on the bus – in the words “we are in Sweden and we have the rules” (sic) – causing several of the little ones to cry.

“Damn, that it should be so difficult to understand what we're saying,” he adds in Swedish. “Why do you come here if you don't follow our rules?”

A Syrian passenger told regional newspaper Västerbottens-kuriren, which first published the video, that the driver had told them they were not welcome in Sweden.

“It was eight horrible hours. He screamed at us whether he had a reason to or not,” he said.

The company, Bergkvarabuss, apologized after the video went viral in Sweden on Tuesday evening, and said the driver had been concerned about safety on board the bus.

“I can only apologize, it is of course highly inappropriate. It's no easy task for the driver either. They are exposed to a lot of stress and pressure, but they must not lose their temper,” Göran Mellström, chief executive of Bergkvarabuss, told the TT newswire.

The video emerges as Sweden's Migration Agency is receiving increasing criticism for not providing enough information while helping asylum seekers find temporary accommodation in the Nordic country.

After a group of refugees stayed on a bus in rural parts of central Sweden for days, refusing to get off because they were “scared of the forest”, a spokeswoman for the agency admitted to The Local that its officers had perhaps not been clear about where they were headed after they boarded the bus in Stockholm.

Sweden, with a population of 9.8 million, expects to receive up to 190,000 asylum applications this year – putting it among the EU states with the highest proportion of refugees per capita.