A Syrian migrant has been awarded 840,000 Swedish kronor (£70k/$96k) in damages after a court mistakenly tried him as an adult in a case involving kidnapping and rape.
The Syrian, who is now said to be 18-years-old, was initially put on trial in the spring of 2017 along with his brother and found guilty of kidnapping and raping two women in the city of Malmo. He was found guilty of several counts including aggravated rape, extortion and theft.
The first woman the two Syrians raped was abducted by them and strangled, while the second was abducted a few weeks later and was placed in a basement where she was beaten and raped and threatened with a gun, Expressen reports.
The two Syrians were initially sentenced to just three years and three months in prison but the younger of the brothers appealed even this.
Surprisingly, a district court actually increased his sentence, albeit to only four and a half years — but common sense would not hold as the rapist continued to press his case.
While both lower courts believed that the younger brother was over the age of 18 at the time of the crimes and tried him as an adult, Sweden’s supreme court would later decide that he had been 16 at the time of the rapes.
The Syrian had come to Sweden as an asylum seeker and had a medical examination in 2017 to determine his age. The migrants produced what they claimed were birth certificates from Syria indicating the younger rapist was a minor, but the courts did not place high evidentiary value on them initially.
Now, the Syrian is set to receive compensation from the government, with the Attorney-General agreeing that his short sentence had been too harsh.
According to a report from Lund University released earlier this year, the majority of convicted rapists in Sweden have migration backgrounds and 47.8 per cent of rapists were born overseas — mostly in North Africa and the Middle East or sub-Saharan Africa.