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Reports dead girl is missing 16-year-old asylum seeker

Several Swedish media are reporting that a female found dead in a forest area in southern Stockholm could be a 16-year-old girl who had sought asylum in the Nordic country.

Published: 2 June 2016 17:09 CEST

Reports dead girl is missing 16-year-old asylum seeker

Police examining the location where the body was found. Photo: Pontus Lundahl/TT

The body was found on Monday after a dog walker spotted an arm sticking out from the moss in a forest area of the Hökarängen suburb of the Swedish capital.

Police launched a murder investigation after forensic teams found that her death may have been suspicious.

The girl has not been formally identified, but several Swedish newspapers reported on Thursday afternoon that she is understood to be a 16-year-old asylum seeker.

The Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper wrote that the girl, from Afghanistan, was reported missing by her boyfriend and the refugee home where she was staying on March 20th.

According to unnamed sources cited by the Swedish daily, police are investigating a theory that there could be an “honour motive” behind her suspected murder.

“We have been told by the police not to talk to anyone about what has happened,” a worker at the asylum home where the young girl was staying told the Aftonbladet tabloid.

Police lead investigator Daniel Edlund and prosecutor Tomas Malmenby both declined to comment during the ongoing investigation when approached by DN.

No one had been arrested by Thursday afternoon.

Sweden took in more than 35,000 underage asylum seekers arriving in the country without their parents in 2015, around 23,000 of whom came from Afghanistan.

Is Sweden meeting its 30-day work permit target for high-skilled foreigners?

More than 7,750 work permit applications have been submitted to Sweden’s Migration Agency since a new system designed to speed up waiting times for skilled workers was implemented.

The new system, rolled out on January 29th, divides workers into four different categories depending on their profession. It was introduced after complaints about long waits for both first-time and renewed work permits and promised to process the top category, “A”, within 30 days.

Category A applications are those already classified as “highly qualified” under the Standard for Swedish Classification of Occupations (SSYK), and include leadership roles, roles requiring higher university education, and roles requiring university education or equivalent.

A Migration Agency spokesperson told The Local that a total of 95 percent of complete work permit applications sent in by highly qualified workers since January 29th were processed within 30 days, with a median handling time of 14 days, according to figures from April 15th.

“Our ambition is to decide cases for highly qualified labour within 30 days – sometimes it happens that the application isn’t complete and that can make the processing time longer,” the spokesperson said.

By mid-April, the Migration Agency had processed 4,461 complete applications, 550 incomplete applications and 423 applications for permanent residency which were complete but had to wait for a decision because the applicant’s previous permit hadn’t yet expired.

Around 77 percent of incomplete applications were processed within 30 days.

A Migration Agency spokesperson told The Local that there may be various reasons why an application is incomplete, but “common mistakes” include passports lacking a signature, incorrect information about accommodation when needed, no or not enough information about the applicant’s insurances, or no statement from the trade union about working conditions.

The spokesperson also said that the four percent of complete applications that didn’t get processed within a month were delayed because of, for example, the applicant failing to visit an embassy to show their passport before the deadline, having a criminal record in Sweden that required further investigation of their application, or the security police blocking their application.

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