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Number of war crimes suspects reported to Swedish police doubles

The number of reports filed to Swedish police over people suspected of war crimes has doubled since 2015.

Number of war crimes suspects reported to Swedish police doubles
A destroyed building in Aleppo, Syria. Photo: Lars Pehrson/SvD/TT

According to newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), the Swedish police war crimes commission handled 80 such cases in 2017.

“A third are about incidents in Syria or Iraq, and beside those there are scattered cases from other countries where there have been or are still conflicts,” Patricia Rakic Arle, head of the commission told SvD.

A large proportion of the reports come from the Swedish Migration Agency, who have specialists in detecting people suspected of war crimes during the asylum process. The number of cases forwarded to the police by them has more than quadrupled since 2014, when there were 12, to 52 in 2017.

In 2017 four people were convicted of war crimes by Swedish courts. One was a man who received a life sentence after killing seven people in Syria.

READ ALSO: Swedish court hands life sentence to Syrians for war crimes