A 33-year-old Iraqi man is under arrest for a spate of sexual assaults and rapes of elderly women in the Swedish city of Umeå.
The man is currently in detention and prosecutors are expected to file charges on May 21, according to public prosecutor Petra Hedberg, who spoke to Swedish news outlet Samnytt.
Police reported on April 8 that the Iraqi man was detained for crimes that were conducted in March of this year. However, once taken into custody, it emerged that he was involved in other crimes, including a serious rape committed on Feb. 23.
In total, the man is believed to have sexually assaulted and raped three elderly women.
“There are different plaintiffs that he is remanded in custody for crimes against. One is a serious sexual assault and I will probably press charges for that. Then there is a serious rape of another person, and I will also press charges for that,” she said.
“Then there are other plaintiffs who have come forward, and for whom he is not in custody. I will probably press charges for sexual harassment against a third plaintiff. So that’s how it looks now,” she said. “As it stands now, the plan is to prosecute next week,” she added.
The man, who comes from Iraq, has to conduct his detention hearings with the help of an Arabic-speaking interpreter.
The Swedish Migration Agency indicates that he applied for a residence permit in Sweden for the first time in October 2015. He has been given several temporary residence permits but was rejected from receiving a permanent residence permit. He has no previous convictions.
Documents also show that he has refused to work in the past in order to stay on social benefits.
Shockingly, the Umeå Municipality was provided a report on Feb. 27, 2025, that he had sexually harassed an older woman in a care home, but despite this, he was allowed to keep working there. This enabled him to eventually sexually assault other women.
Malin Hansson, deputy director of operations for Umeå’s municipal home care, refused to answer questions posed by Samnytt about the man.
“I cannot speak calmly right now. I cannot stand up right now,” she said when contacted by Samnytt.
When asked why they kept employing the man despite his sexual harassment allegations and worked there despite needing a translator to communicate, she said: “I have no comments on that part, so I need to end the conversation right now. I want to end the conversation.”
As the various stories linked above in this article attest to, instances of migrant men raping elderly women, including in senior care homes, are far from unusual in Europe. Many cases have likely gone unreported, as these women are in a vulnerable position, often cut off from their families and sometimes with limited cognitive abilities due to advanced age. Furthermore, these linked articles are just a small sample of the Remix News archive involving such cases, which are already only a fraction of the overall cases. Remix News lacks the resources to comprehensively cover each such case that is reported in Europe.
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