STOCKHOLM
— Three men in Uppsala, Sweden, were arrested on Sunday on suspicion of
raping a woman and streaming the assault live to a private Facebook
group. On Monday, the authorities urged people with access to the images
showing the assault to make them available to investigators.
“Police
and prosecutors have access to some of the images and video footage,”
Magnus Berggren, a prosecutor in Uppsala, said at a news conference, the
Swedish newspaper Expressen reported. “What we do not have access to is
the segment showing the actual assault.”
Police
officers were sent to an apartment in Uppsala, a university city about
40 miles north of Stockholm, shortly before 9 a.m. on Sunday after
receiving several calls reporting a rape in progress that was being
streamed live to a closed group on Facebook, Expressen reported.
The police arrested three men, 18, 20 and 24, at the apartment, Expressen reported.
“We
are gathering evidence, technical evidence, but also interviewing,” Mr.
Berggren said at the news conference. “We have questioned a number of
people and there will be more interviews.”
While
Facebook Live streams occur in real time, the videos can be replayed
later by people with access to the page if the person who filmed it
chooses that option, until the videos are taken down. There are ways for
viewers to record the stream on computers or to take screenshots of it.
A police spokeswoman, Lisa Sannervik, said there were probably many copies of the stream.
“Many
have seen this on the internet, and we are eager to prevent any
spreading of the movie,” Ms. Sannervik told the Swedish news agency TT.
Christine Chen, a Facebook spokeswoman, said, “This is a hideous crime and we do not tolerate this kind of content on Facebook.”
She
added: “If someone does violate our community standards while using
Live, we want to interrupt these streams as quickly as possible when
they’re reported to us. So we’ve given people a way to report violations
during a live broadcast.”
Swedish
Television News reported that there might have been two live videos on
Facebook, the first showing a rape and the second capturing a man trying
to force a woman to deny that she had been raped.
Mr. Berggren, the prosecutor, could not confirm this because the video was not available, Swedish Television News reported.
Images
of the suspects are being shared on social media, and hundreds of
people are said to have seen the live video, Swedish Television News
reported.
Linda
Johansson, who lives near Hassleholm in southern Sweden, told Swedish
Television News that she started watching the second live video around 8
a.m.
“The
girl was sitting in front of the camera while the man who filmed her
tried to convince her to deny that she had been raped,” Ms. Johansson
told Swedish Television News. “He was putting words into her mouth. He
was taunting and laughing throughout the whole clip.”
Over
the past year, Facebook has made live, user-generated video a top
priority. But the company’s push into live video has not been without
disturbing occurrences. In July, three men in Norfolk, Va., were shot as they streamed video on Facebook, less than a week after the death of Philando Castile, whose killing by the police in St. Paul, Minn., was streamed live on Facebook.
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