“You have had a guardian angel. You might just as well have been dead by now,” one of the Malmö policemen investigating the shooting told the man as he recovered in hospital, according to court documents.
This is not the first report of a coin stopping a bullet.
A gold dollar coin is reputedly to have stopped a bullet fired at George Erasmus Dixon, who commanded the Confederate submarine HL Hunley during its successful mission to sink the Union's USS Housatonic during the American Civil War.
There have also been stories of coins stopping bullets in India, Israel, and Turkey, amongst other places.
The Mythbusters television programme in 2008 investigated whether it would be possible for a police badge to stop a bullet, and judged such a scenario as “plausible”.
While it is still conceivable that the coin saved the Swedish man's life, it did not leave him unharmed, as he was hit by four other bullets during the shooting on May 30.
The man was shot while having a barbecue with friends on a patch of grass near the city's Rosengård School. He flipped around and was then shot again in the stomach, and was close to death by the time he arrived in hospital for emergency treatment.
A middle-aged man and his two sons are in custody awaiting trial for the shootings. Police suspect the shooting was linked to a brawl over a young woman at a Malmö nightclub.
Malmö police released a picture of the bag, showing a bullet hole:
They also released a photo of the place where the man was shot:
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