Claudia Mayor is a loving mother whose three teenage sons are at the heart of a horrifying story that has appalled and divided Sweden.
In the early spring of 2023, the boys launched a cold-blooded attack on a Middle Eastern migrant who had raped the 15-year-old girlfriend of their younger brother.
It left the 26-year-old migrant hanging lifeless from a rope on a forest tree.
Claudia has never spoken publicly before about the crime, which bore all the hallmarks of a modern-day lynching. It led to the teenagers, then aged between 16 and 18, being convicted of murder – although the convictions were dropped on appeal when the court could not decide exactly how the man died.
But this week, the 46-year-old housewife agreed to talk to the Mail at her small house in Uppsala, an hour’s drive from the Swedish capital. ‘When I heard what the boys had done to this man, it was beyond belief,’ she told me. ‘I slapped each of them hard.’
‘But,’ she added, ‘I understand why it happened. Our country is changed and Swedish girls are not safe or protected from the strangers who have been invited in to live among them. Look around you. It’s not mostly Swedish faces any more. There are many Arab ones from a different culture. It was not like this when I came as a six-year-old child migrant with my parents.’
Claudia’s story – of which we will hear more later – is not the only one where mass immigration is being blamed for the catastrophic transformation of this once-peaceful nation into one of terrifying criminality.
On Wednesday night, an anti-Islam campaigner and atheist who had sparked violent protests in Muslim countries by burning the Koran outside Stockholm Central Mosque last year was shot dead in his flat near the capital.
Salwan Momika, an Iraqi refugee, 38, had been charged in August with ‘agitations against an ethnic group’ and had been due to appear in court on Thursday morning.
Following the assassination, Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson admitted: ‘We have lost control, over a wave of violence’ – an echo of comments from National Police Chief Petra Lundh, who talked of the ‘brutality and ruthlessness that exists in organised crime’.
Last month, the Swedish government announced it will in future only admit newcomers who promise to make an ‘honest living’ and uphold the country’s values as it tightened citizenship rules.
Over the past century, Sweden has been Europe’s number one sanctuary for ‘war weary’ or persecuted people – Claudia herself came here, like others, to escape the fascist regime of Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet four decades ago.
In 2015, as huge numbers of migrants headed to Europe during the Syrian civil war, Sweden welcomed 163,000 asylum seekers from the Middle East, a gesture that many today believe has provoked a national crisis.
The country that once boasted Europe’s lowest crime rate is now facing rampant murder, gun warfare, a drugs crisis, illegal prostitution rackets, and a rape epidemic.
The rise in criminality is blamed by the centre-Right government on gangs disproportionately made up of first and second-generation migrants. A 2023 police report said there are 14,000 active gang members in Sweden, some of them children as young as nine or ten, with a further 48,000 people ‘affiliated’ to them.
Meanwhile, bomb explosions are an almost everyday occurrence. In 2024 there were 124 across the country. In the first 30 days of this year in the Stockholm area and Claudia’s own county of Uppsala, there were 33 – three taking place during my short visit as rival gangs threatened or actually targeted businesses in extortion rackets.
Stockholm’s per-capita murder rate today is roughly 30 times that of London and half the suspects are aged between 15 and 20 amid a huge demographic shift over the past two decades.
Between 2002 and 2023, the share of the Swedish population who are either foreign-born or have at least one foreign-born parent increased from 21 per cent to 35 per cent, according to a report by government agency Sweden Statistics.
A rearguard action by the government means immigration has fallen – just 6,250 people were allowed in last year. Migration Minister Johan Forssell is now even offering migrants a £28,000 grant to return home.
It is an about-turn that chimes with the mood of the nation. ‘What happened during the refugee crisis of 2015 was that our open-heart policy met a very tough reality,’ Forssell said earlier this month. ‘If you don’t believe in boys and girls playing or swimming together, this is not the country for you.’
And perhaps the most deeply disturbing aspect of this ‘tough reality’ is that Sweden, once so safe for women, now has a rape rate just behind some Caribbean and Southern African hotspots.
One rape, of course, is too many – and in 1975 police received reports of 421. But by 2023, the annual tally had reached 9,300, the highest rape incidence per head of population in Europe.
A report last week by Sweden’s Lund University said two-thirds of all convicted rapists are recent or second-generation immigrants.
One of the victims was nine-year-old Luna, whose parents will never recover from what happened to their daughter in the quiet northern town of Skelleftea in Swedish Lapland.
On July 7, 2022, Luna left primary school on her bicycle to ride the ten minutes home where her mother Emelie was waiting to give her supper. She never arrived.
Instead, she was pulled into the forest, stripped, beaten, raped and strangled with her own shoelaces by a 15-year-old Ethiopian migrant called Abushi Kamal who had been granted residence in the area the week before.
He had arrived in Sweden five years earlier with his family and had been investigated by the police for ‘several sexual assaults’ from the age of 12, although never put under lock and key.
Luna is now severely brain damaged as a result of the loss of oxygen to her brain. She is wheelchair-bound, and spoon-fed by her family including her little sister, aged six. Apart from uttering the word ‘Mama’ to Emelie, 34, she has not spoken since.
Emelie, a grocery store manager, has never given an interview before. But last week, as the migrant rape figures were released, she agreed to speak to the Mail from the family’s home in Moro Backe, a nine-hour drive north from Stockholm.
She said ‘a lot of migrants’ have been settled in the town. But she and her husband, a care worker who does not want to be named, ‘didn’t think about it as a dangerous issue’, she said.
‘I am speaking out now because this kind of attack should not happen in a civilised country. I do not want Luna to be forgotten or the same thing to happen to other children like her.’
Luna now needs 24-hour-a-day support from carers. ‘We are all living this with Luna every day,’ she said.
A recent visit to Luna’s grandparents took days to plan. ‘But Luna did recognise them and she knew where she was. When her friends come round, she realises they are there and smiles,’ added Emelie.
The family believe that Luna, who has developed epilepsy, can remember the day of the rape because sometimes she becomes ‘inconsolable, sad, and upset… All the carefree happiness of childhood has been taken away,’ said her mother.
The laughter of other children in the playground is thought to have hidden Luna’s screams as she was dragged away by the rapist.
She was only discovered later in the afternoon when a boy told police he had found what looked like a ‘dead girl’s body’ in the woods. ‘No one heard or saw anything,’ says Emelie. ‘When Luna didn’t come home, I went to the school in my car. I was frantic. I saw the ambulances and her bike on the ground. Then they told me what had happened.’
As for the teenage attacker Kamal, he is now in a closed psychiatric unit. His family have been moved out of Moro Backe by the Swedish authorities. But none of them has been deported.
Ludvig Aspling, a lawyer and immigration spokesman for the hard-Right Sweden Democrats party – now polling joint second in the country – is unsurprised that Luna’s parents didn’t think about the impact of mass migration on Swedes.
‘Migration is still not talked about,’ he said. ‘There is almost a complete blackout by the mainstream media. Public broadcasters say high crime by immigrants is a ‘racist myth’. Most people have no idea what is going on or how serious the consequences can be for them.’
For Claudia Mayor, those consequences could not be more serious. With the help of Claudia and her family, we have pieced together just what happened on that fateful day when her sons took revenge against the migrant who had raped the 15-year-old schoolgirl.
The migrant made his living selling alcohol to underage children. The girl, whom we shall call Jessy, was dating Claudia’s 15-year-old son, and met the migrant to buy a bottle of vodka in February 2023 near her home in a village close to the city of Uppsala. He pulled her into his car and assaulted her as she fought him off.
She escaped and immediately reported the crime to local police who admit now, to their regret, they did nothing. One senior officer has said publicly that an investigation might have ‘stopped a death’.
Angry at the police inaction, Jessy sought vigilante justice herself. She enlisted the help of her boyfriend’s three elder brothers – and begged them to punish her abuser.
She then texted the rapist and asked him for another bottle of vodka. The trio of teenage boys were waiting to greet him in a remote forest nature reserve.
A commotion ensued. The boys had brought rope and masking tape to conduct what the prosecutor later said was an ‘execution’.
The migrant was found hanging dead from a tree a week later, after his family alerted the police to the fact that he was missing.
Court evidence showed that Jessy sent text messages to her friends saying: ‘They will meet my rapist. Hahaha.’ Another from her phone after the hanging explained: ‘He is now dead.’
The three boys were initially convicted of murder. Their 15-year-old younger brother and his girlfriend Jessy were found guilty of aiding and abetting the killing.
It was only after an appeal that the murder convictions were reduced to kidnap and assault charges. One brother, who was 18 and therefore an adult when it happened, is still serving a prison sentence. The younger boys and Jessy are on probation and picking up their lives.
The crime and its cause have divided Sweden.
Some have written on social media that the four boys and the girl ‘deserve a medal’ for meting out vigilante-style justice after the police failed to act. Others are more sympathetic to the hanged man.
When we spoke to the brothers this week, one admitted: ‘We were headstrong. It got out of hand. We did not come to kill him, but to frighten him. To stop him raping any other girl again.
‘The prosecutor painted us as ‘100 per cent monsters’,’ he added. ‘He insinuated that the girl had not really been raped and she was making it up. That was crazy and cruel to her.
‘When the migrant died unexpectedly, we were terrified. We checked his pulse but he was already dead.’
The brothers said when they first confronted the rapist in the forest he denied he attacked Jessy, saying they had got the wrong man.
‘So, we went through his phone to identify him. On social media, he had porn pictures of children aged between eight and 16,’ said one brother.
‘When we proved he was the rapist and a paedophile, we tied him up and put the rope around his neck to warn him.
‘He was sitting on the ground and he began to panic. He tried to get up and we pulled the rope. We didn’t realise how fast you can die from that.
‘We felt his pulse and it wasn’t there. We nearly called the police. Then we thought we would make it look like a suicide and hung him up from a tree.
‘We made a terrible mistake. We realise we took him away from his family and we are sorry for that.’
The brother felt the court had been harsh. ‘People who were once friends no longer speak to me, thinking I killed someone,’ said the teenager. ‘It is very hard to start again.’
One thing the boys are all sure about – and now the courts have agreed – is that they did not commit a murder.
Indeed, many on social media praise the teenage brothers for punishing a migrant rapist.
Others, like their worried mother Claudia Mayor, would agree with the person who wrote on a Swedish website: ‘This is tragic on so many levels. That a young, raped girl was not protected by police nor courts and was left to figure out her own form of justice, is so horrific.
‘She was utterly failed by our society.’
