Topic awaiting preservation: It's been a black day in Sweden today...

Not only did our foreign minister Anna Lindh die from wounds sustained in a knife attack at one of Stockholms most exclusive malls yesterday afternoon.
She was attacked by a lone man in the mid-twenties about five in the afternoon and stabbed repeatedly in the chest and liver. She died at 05.29 this morning from the blood loss after all night on the operation table.
She was 46 years old and leaves her husband and 2 sons 9 and 12 behind.

The killer ran out of the mall and havn't been found yet.
Our forign minister did not have any bodyguards assigned for protection, 4 days before a peoples vote on changing SEK to Euro. Quote from our version of Secret Service: "We could not see any imminent threats that warranted special protection at that point in time..."
Idiots!

To top this day off, a five year old child was knifed to death this morning in the kindergarden yard by a person diagnosed mentally ill that was ON LEAVE from the hospital!
Idiots!

Third, a 19 year old girl who has been missing for 3 days was found dead, her 19 year ex boyfriend and a friend of his are prime suspects.
Idiots!

Christ what a day!
Anna Lindh was the only swedish politician that I actually respected and she was tipped to become the next prime minister of sweden. It would have been a superb choice.

I'm shaken to the core right now.
/Dan

{cell 260}
-{ a vibration is a movement that doesn't know which way to go }-

DmS: Yes the news about Anna Lindh is shocking - the other events didn't make the news over here but they sound just as bad

[edit: And, of course, it is 911 - I wonder if it makes all the crazies come out of the woodwork?]

___________________
Emps

FAQs: Emperor

I agree with your 2nd and 3rd "Idiots!" but as for the first one, it's easy to say what should have been done after the bad thing has already happened.
I read some news about your country and this sad event of today and based on the info I read, there really were no evidence showning necessity to protect the lady. You barely had a history of politician murderers in your past.
If your people were spending money for the last five years protecting the high-level policitians, believing that the real threat was very unprobable, I guess that you would start complaining about the public spending.
Now, unfortunately, things have changed at a high cost...

Edit: changed a verb

[This message has been edited by viol (edited 09-12-2003).]

All of those things came as a shock... The death of Anna Lindh was an "extra shock" since the doctors said the situation was serious, but not life threatning only a couple of hours before she died...

Agree with Viol about the idiots. There haven't been a need for body guards around the Swedish politicans until now, so spending money on it would have seemed a waste without the knowledge we now have...


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"There are 10 kinds of people; those who know binary, those who don't and those who start counting at zero"

[This message has been edited by Veneficuz (edited 09-12-2003).]

Dms: I agree with your 2 last "Idiots!" sentences.
I find that really nice to hear that politician go in public without a bunch of "gorillas" in Sweden. Unfortunatelly AFAIK it's the second time that one of them gets stabbed in 20 years in Sweden

On the other side, I find extremely surprising that a man can stab somebody in a mall and flee. I imagine the people around were shocked and didn't really understood what was happening. But your malls don't have cameras or security service ? How is that possible ? Even if the security service wasn't aware of the attack, they might have reacted when they saw a man running out of the mall, no ?

When Bertand Delanoë - the mayor of Paris - got stabbed, he's been immediately taken care of and his attacker have been immediatly arrested. Ok, it happend while Bertrand Delanoë was at a public event ( which is not the case for Anna Lindh ) but nothing let foreshadow that such a thing could happen.
I fear that public peoples are subjects to the madness of a minority and thus need the protection of body-guards.

We're living in a crazy world. Recently, a man have been charged with a raping accusation. But what's worse is that this very man had already been condamned for a similar affair and went in jail for while.

Veneficuz:

quote:

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"There are 10 kinds of people; those who know binary, those who don't and those who start counting at zero"

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Hum, I count 11 kinds of people in that sentence.

Mathieu "POÏ" HENRI

...that's 'cause you're counting wrong, poi...


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Well, let's put it this way on the first "Idiots" part.

Not all reaches the international news but here are some of the incidents from the latest years.

Carl Bildt, a minister eats lunch outside and a man steps up and empties his lunch box over his head.

Bo Ringholm, Financial minister walks in public with the budget proposal surrounded by jornalists and other ministers, one man runs up and plants a cace in his face.

Our king is in public and someone runs past the bodyguards and cakes him.

A drunken man steps up to Anna Lindh as she speaks in public, opens a beer bottle with his teeth and starts waving the bottle, he is dragged off by her fellow ministers who are close.

Not to count the continuing stream of hate mail and threats that they recieve on a dailiy basis.

Sure, most of these incidents were harmless and the persons detained directly after, but what if it had been bricks instead of cakes, or knifes, guns... Not that funny.

And yes, I really value the fact that our politicians aren't enclosed in black armoured limousines or surrounded by gorillas at all times they are in public.
But still, there are a lot of loonies here that want to get famous in any way possible. While Sweden is a relatively calm place when it comes to violence compared to other places in the world, it's not a kindergarden where everybody are friends and goes cuddly coo all the time.

Unfortunatley that is the way Sweden is portrayed a lot of times.

As for the cost argument against protection (which is used as a very real factor here) I find that ridicilous. Why?
Well, if Olof Palme had had bodyguards back in 1986 he might still have been shot and killed since there really is no way to stop a killer willing to sacrifice himself, however the killer would certainly have been caught or shot which would have saved this country hundreds of millions spent so far on the 17 year long hunt for the killer. Not to mention the embarrasment of not catching him.

Take this fact as an example.
No ministers here (with the possible exception of the prime minister) are allowed to use a car (Limousine, Taxi, Private car) to and from work without having to pay extra taxes out of their salary for the "privilige" to ride a car to and from work.

Thus most of them ride subways, trains and buses to and from work.
Why can't they be allowed the extra saftey of controlled transportation to work without having to be taxed extra for it on top of having to pay for it themselves?
After all they do run the country.

Imagine the IRS telling the speaker of the house in the US that he has to take the bus to work to avoid extra taxes because it would be an unfair benefit otherwise.
Then add the fact that he would not get any extra protection at all unless a specific threat was made at him, or he was scheduled for a public appearance.

poi:

quote:

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I find extremely surprising that a man can stab somebody in a mall and flee. I imagine the people around were shocked and didn't really understood what was happening. But your malls don't have cameras or security service ? How is that possible ? Even if the security service wasn't aware of the attack, they might have reacted when they saw a man running out of the mall, no ?

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You are not alone with those thoughts...
Yes there are security cameras, however in Sweden you are not allowed to have hidden cameras, the law states the you must clearly inform the public that they are in an area covered by cameras.

And the security service...
Let's put it this way.
1 - They are not armed with anything but a nightstick and handcuffs.
2 - They are really good at responding to alarms in a shop to catch a shoplifter
3 - There are few of them and the mall has 6 stories

This took place within a minute or two, she was chased up the stairs, clubbed down and stabbed two or three times. The killer walked down the stairs, dumped the knife, jacket and cap, then jogged out of there.

As if he is caught on tapes or not the police has not revealed.

/Dan

{cell 260}
-{ a vibration is a movement that doesn't know which way to go }-

[This message has been edited by DmS (edited 09-12-2003).]

The 16-year old girl (not 19), actually went to the same school as me . Didn't know her personally though.
We had a a moment of silence this morning.

About the cameras.

Apparently they did have cameras, but they were not allowed to tape anything, so all they did was relay live info to a control room. Hence no pics of the assassin.

I think that a core problem in Sweden is that we ourselves still like to believe we're this calm fuzzy loving fairy-country where these things just don't happen. In my book that's just ignorance, since we can't expect such an utopic society. Wake up and smell the coffee! The world is filled with nutcases!

The swedish police better get this one. I think they would be extremely uncomfortable with missing out another assassin after the shooting of Palme in 1986.

about cameras:

In France, the cameras records what they see and the tapes are re-used every 24 hours thus if an accident happens, the police can take them as evidences. The cameras aren't all visibles but the public is informed of their presence.

about security services:

They doesn't need to be armed to master someone. Usually they're used to close combat techniques and shouldn't have any problem to catch an un-trained person. In France there's even often a "dog master", understand a security man with a dog, along with classical security men.

Petskull: I was counting in binary and not from zero.

Mathieu "POÏ" HENRI

Hasn't John Fitzgerald Kennedy said that absolutely nothing can prevent a decided man to murder ?

It is to me really ashaming that humans kill themselves, members of the same species, for ideologic purposes or convictions. Plaute was so right on track when he wrote "Homo homini lupus" (approximately from Latin: man is a wolf to man). Murders, rapes etc. sometimes the human species appears really dirty to me.

However, even if I find this murder stupid and horrible, there is something I would like to say. It is not the single sad thing that occured in the world this day. In Africa, I'm sure a few hundred children lost their family in an ethnic war, were tortured, raped and then killed. Or it reminds me also of the death of this football player in France, during a match. I believe he had an heart attack and died while playing. The entire France was moved by this death... Even if this person lived for more than 25 years, had a peaceful, easy and rich life, did what he wanted, and died doing what he liked. It disgusted me to become aware that France felt sorry for this man who lived a good life, and on the contrary didn't give a hoot about the young children who die at the age of 13 in favelas in South America, after living a short, harsh and bad life.

The medias have a stupid tendency to create martyrs, and this post is a good example of it. If we are complaining about the murder of this famous politician, we should cry for the thousands sadier things occuring in the world at every moment.



Edit : grammar, grammar...

[This message has been edited by Moon Shadow (edited 09-13-2003).]

Have you ever noticed that it's the people that want to improve the world that get killed? JFK, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, blah blah blah, etc. etc. Bloody hell, what's wrong with us? Is improving the world such a bad day? Is a positive ideology such a hated thing that one would extinguish the life of another just to stop it?

I read somewhere that we'll probably be extinct by 2100. My bet is for before 2050.

What type of country are you guys running over there? Where's the common sense?

And I thought we Yanks were nuts!