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Girl stabbed to death at Norway refugee centre

A 17-year-old girl was stabbed to death at a refugee reception centre in Western Norway on Thursday night, in one of the worst examples of refugee violence yet seen in the country.

Published: 20 November 2015 13:55 CET

Girl stabbed to death at Norway refugee centre

Police at the refugee centre where a 17-year-old-girl was killed on Thursday. Photo: Ingrid Ellevset/NTB scanpix

An 18-year-old man, also Eritrean, has been arrested and charged with “causing severe bodily injury leading to death”, police lawyer Knut Meek Corneliussen told the local Adresseavisen newspaper on Friday morning.

”The detained man has been living at the centre for about a year, while the victim hasn’t been here that long,” Jarl Aspen, from the local police, said on Thursday night.

“The situation was unclear so we dispatched several police officers to the scene. We now have control and the suspect has been detained. As far as we know, no one else was involved.”

According to a police statement, the woman was found severely wounded shortly before 8.30pm last night.

When the police arrived shortly afterwards, the 18-year-old tried to escape by jumping out of a window, but hurt his foot when he landed, after which he was arrested without struggle.

Ambulances arrived at 8.55pm, but medics were unable to save the girl, who was confirmed dead an hour later.

“This is a tragic event, both for the residents at the reception and for those who work there,” said Ståle Refstie, mayor of Sunndal, the town where the centre is located. “We must work to find out how that could happen.”

Police have yet to disclose the relationship, if any, between the two.

An Eritrean asylum seeker in August stabbed a mother and her son to death at a branch of IKEA in the Swedish city of Västerås, selecting them seemingly at random.

A failed asylum seeker from South Sudan in 2013 stabbed and killed two men and a woman on a bus near Årdal, where he had been staying in an asylum centre.l

Norway's immigration authority closes 1,000 cases into suspected cheating

The Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) has dismissed more than 1,000 asylum and immigration cases after it had been told to reduce the queue of cases by the Ministry of Justice, public broadcaster NRK reports.

Frode Forfang, director of UDI, told NRK that the UDI chose to close cases where there were suspicions that false information had been provided to prioritise what it considered to be the most pressing and serious cases .

“We were in a situation where a large number of cases were created, but our capacity was not proportionate to the number of cases. This meant that we did not get a good enough grip on the matters that we believe are the most serious. At the same time, it led to a good number of these cases becoming very old,” he said.

“Many people lived in uncertainty for a long time because we did not have the capacity,” he added.

The UDI also decided last year that cases older than three years old would not be reopened, according to the report from NRK.

Figures from the UDI provided to the broadcaster show that 78 people have been deported from Norway due to false information submitted with their asylum cases over the past six years.

In recent years, the rules for deporting those who have provided false information in asylum applications have been softened.

Over the last six years, nearly 900 people in Norway have received a new residence permit after their original one was withdrawn after the UDI had uncovered falsehoods in the original applications.

Forfang said it was important for the UDI to focus on cases where the applicant would likely be deported.

“We think that it is more important to work on those cases where we believe that the person in question may end up having to leave Norway, rather than those cases where the person in question will anyway be allowed to stay in Norway through a new permit,” Forfang said.

The UDI has previously told The Local that it had its budget cut. The directorate warned that this could mean longer waiting times for residence, asylum and citizenship in Norway.

“These budget cuts will reduce the UDI’s ability to process cases and respond to inquiries efficiently. A decrease in capacity to process cases may lead to extended waiting times for residency and citizenship applications, although this will also depend on the volume of cases received,” Beate Sveen, the UDI’s Director of Finance, told The Local last month.

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