Mandel Ngan, AFP file picture | Trump based his cautionary comments on Sweden on an interview aired on Fox News with controversial filmmaker Ami Horowitz

The police officers who appeared in a video that US President Donald Trump cited in his false claims of an incident in Sweden have lashed out at the US filmmaker who interviewed them, saying their quotes were heavily edited and taken out of context.

Advertising Read more

Parts of the video, which paints a dire picture of Sweden and its alleged problems with migrants, were aired on Fox News on Friday night. At a campaign-style rally in Florida on Saturday, Trump suggested that Sweden had become a hotbed of violence due to immigration.

”We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany. You look at what's happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They're having problems like they never thought possible,” Trump said during the rally in Melbourne, Florida.

My statement as to what's happening in Sweden was in reference to a story that was broadcast on @FoxNews concerning immigrants & Sweden. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 19, 2017

The bulk of the video was based on the testimonies of two Swedish police officers, who now say that their quotes were both heavily edited and taken out of context by US filmmaker Ami Horowitz to give a distorted picture of Sweden.

“He is a madman,” Anders Goranzon, one of the officers, told Swedish daily “Dagens Nyheter” after having watched the clip.

“We don’t stand behind it (the report). It shocked us. He edited the answers. We were answering completely different questions in the interview. This is bad journalism,” he said.

Where did statistics come from?

According to the officers, they were asked about rising crime rates in certain areas and the increased access to arms.

“The interview was about something completely different from what Fox News and Horowitz were talking about,” Goranzon continued. “It was supposed to be about crime in high-risk areas. Areas with high crime rates. There wasn’t any focus on migration or immigration.”

Horowitz’s 10-minute “Stockholm Syndrome” report, however, almost exclusively focused on the alleged problems Sweden now faces after accepting large numbers of migrants and refugees in recent years. It claimed that an increasing Muslim population was at the root of Sweden’s troubles.

Horowitz appears to be citing statistics to back up his report, but Swedish media have been quick to poke holes in most of the claims.

In one instance, for example, Horowitz said that Sweden accepted more than 160,000 asylum seekers in 2016. A fact-check published by Swedish news agency TT this week, however, states that less than half that number – some 67,000 refugees – were granted asylum that year.

"There was an absolute surge in gun violence and rape in Sweden once they began this open door policy,” Horowitz told Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

But according to TT, while Sweden’s murder rate has indeed increased in the underworld over the past three decades, the numbers remain surprisingly low: The country saw an average of 14 murders a year between 2010 and 2014. This reflects an increase from around four murders per year between 1990 and 1994.

The origin or religion of the perpetrators are not quantified in these statistics.

Spreading false picture of Sweden

In his interview with Carlson, Horowitz also claimed that the Swedish government “has gone out of its way to try to cover-up some of these problems”.

In an email to TT on Monday, Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom vehemently rejected that claim.

"The Foreign Ministry and the embassies are working continuously to spread an accurate and fair picture of Sweden. Unfortunately, we see a general tendency that the incidence of false information is increasing," she wrote.

Horowitz also told Carlson that Sweden was the target of its “first terrorist Islamic attack not that long ago, so they're now getting a taste of what we have been seeing in Europe already”.

However, the attack Horowitz is believed to be referring to occurred in 2010, when terror suspect Taimour Abdulwahab blew himself up in a botched suicide attack in central Stockholm. Abdulwahab died in the attack but no one else was injured.

Daily newsletterReceive essential international news every morning Subscribe