Daily Mail reports:
An American journalist documented the moment he claims he was given a police escort to leave a predominantly migrant suburb of Stockholm after he and his camerawoman were followed by masked men.
Tim Pool and his colleague Emily Molli were in the ‘no-go zone’ of Rinkeby, Sweden, when police told them to leave after they began to be followed by people who apparently objected to them filming on Wednesday.
Police, however, have disputed Pool’s claims that police escorted them out of the area, saying they were unable to find specific reports filed about the incident in their system.
Pool has been traveling around Sweden on a trip funded by Paul Joseph Watson, a writer for right-wing website Infowars who promised to pay for a trip to the country for any journalist who claimed it was safe following claims that Sweden’s perceived migrant problems were overblown.
On Wednesday, Pool and Molli traveled to Rinkeby, where riots broke out after President Donald Trump warned of migrant problems in Sweden last month. Nine out of ten residents in Rinkeby are immigrants.
‘You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden,’ Trump said in a speech in February. ‘Sweden. Who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.’
During a video uploaded to Pool’s YouTube channel, he and Molli are seen speaking to a third man, before they say police have told them to leave the area.
‘Several men started masking up and following us. Police told us to leave and had to escort us to our car,’ he wrote in a Twitter post on Wednesday.
Molli reiterated Pool’s thoughts in her own Twitter posts on Wednesday.
‘Wasn’t expecting such a quick reaction of masking up as soon as we got to the Rinkeby center. Camera was down at my side most of the time,’ Molli wrote. ‘we asked an officer if he thought we could get an interview from a local, he advised it would probably start trouble.’
After they left the area, Pool recapped what happened in a later clip in the video, in which he said he asked police about ‘no-go’ zones, which are apparently unsafe to travel into.
He said that police told him that there are problem areas, where officers can’t go in unless they have two units, where one cop will watch the other officer.
Pool told The Local that police officers noticed people around Pool and Molli started putting up their hoods and ‘whispering to each other’.
‘So the cop was like ‘maybe it would be smart if you were to leave now, that’s my tip for you’,’ Pool said. ‘They got in their car to escort us out and we just had to walk alongside their vehicle, and they followed us to our car. As we were walking there were people following us, yelling things.’
Police, however, said that Pool and his crew did not have a police escort leaving the area.
‘Our understanding is that he didn’t receive an escort. However, he followed the police who left the place,’ Stockholm police press spokesperson Kjell Lindgren told The Local.
Frida Nordlöf, a police officer in the Järva district, told the Stockholm newspaper Mitt i that there were extra police officers in the area because of a poetry event that was happening that night, and they planned on a lot of visitors.
‘When Tim Pool took out a camera and started filming a group of young people they pulled their hoods up and covered their faces and shouted at him to stop filming,’ she told Mitt i. ‘The officers then told Tim Pool that it was not wise to stay there in the middle of the square and keep filming.
‘Then the patrol was going to Rinkeby Academy and that’s where Pool’s team had parked their car so it was more out of coincidence that they followed each other there.’
Pool, a journalist from Chicago, first made headlines during the Occupy Wall Street protests, where he primarily used his phone to film clips for social media and live broadcasting.
Sweden hit the headlines recently when Trump warned of crime caused by migrants while at a rally in Florida.
He was mocked on social media and forced to admit that he was referring to a report on Fox News rather than an actual event.
Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said he was ‘surprised’ by Trump’s comments.
A forgotten suburb of Stockholm, Rinkeby is where brazen youths openly deal heroin and other drugs inside the entrance to the only train station. Stolen goods are on sale at the red brick over town square.
School attendance levels are of great concern in the sprawling immigrant ghetto, where a massive 89.3 per cent of residents were born outside Sweden. Unemployment rates are among the highest in Sweden, at 15.4 per cent.
The recent rioting in Rinkeby has been blamed on a hardcore group of criminals from immigrant backgrounds.
These gangs have no links to radical Islam or any other religious groups, police sources have confirmed.
The far right Swedish Democrats claim last month’s carnage at Rinkeby was a direct result of mass immigration to Sweden.
The country has run a liberal immigration policy for over 20 years, accepting tens of thousands of refugees every year including huge numbers of Kurds, Iraqis and Somalis.
The system reached breaking point in 2015, following the arrival of over 160,000 refugees to Sweden during Europe’s refugee crisis.
