[4] A police spokesman played down the scale of these harassment incidents: around 15 such reports, by 170,000 people for five days gathered in an open youth music festival, "is still too many, but also not very much".
[2] On 9 January, crime reporter Lasse Wierup published an article in newspaper Dagens Nyheter as a reaction to the New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Germany, especially in Cologne.
[19] The following day, Dagens Nyheter published an article criticizing the Stockholm police for withholding the information in their media communication, and pointed to something as the reason for not reporting on the assaults.
[2] According to one memo, police in 2015 were told to be vigilant of young men sexually assaulting women in the crowd, as the previous year such offences had been committed, mostly by migrants, including Afghans.
[24] The Prime Minister of Sweden, Stefan Löfven, said that the women assaulted were victims of a "double betrayal" and promised to respond quickly to address the events.
[26] Sweden's Prime Minister Stefan Löfven harshly criticised the police: "I feel a very strong anger that young women are not able to go to a music festival without being offended, sexually harassed and attacked...
[24] Answering questions, Opitz wrote that his staff had made multiple attempts to investigate, and had even found that some of the information in the tip (for example, that large numbers of people had been arrested) was not true.