Three of the men should be sentenced to four years and six months in prison, the fourth should be sentenced to a slightly lower sentence, prosecutor Andersson stated in his plea in the security room at Stockholm District Court on Tuesday.
The men, all in their 20s, are suspected of assaulting three men with a foreign background, one of whom was also robbed, in central Stockholm on the night of August 27 this year.
According to the indictment, three of them were involved in all the acts, while the fourth man had left the group when the last assault took place.
Hate crime
The prosecutor believes that this is a hate crime.
They have seemingly randomly selected people with a foreign background.
The men have shouted racist slurs and at least three of them have chanted during the acts. One of them has also scrawled a far-right symbol on a shop window.
In addition to the hate crime motive, it is aggravating that the assaults were committed in a group and that the victims were outnumbered when they were suddenly attacked, he says. Furthermore, the act has constituted a serious interference with the victims' health and safety, according to the prosecutor, who points to what they said in court.
The plaintiff has perceived it as the worst day of his life, he says, his life changed after this, says Gustav Andersson about one of the men.
The men who were beaten testified earlier in the trial about the completely unprovoked violence they were suddenly subjected to.
"They knew what they were doing, like they had trained to hurt," one of the men said.
Denies
All four accused men are linked to the Nazi and violence-prone movement Aktivklubb Sverige.
They deny all of their actions – except for the last assault, in which the three men involved claimed self-defense. That incident was caught on surveillance camera.
Regarding other events, the defense questions what the investigation actually shows. They point to, among other things, a lack of reliability among witnesses and plaintiffs – who they believe have provided conflicting information.
"Someone's possible personal opinions do not mean that a person necessarily acts in accordance with those opinions," says lawyer Ville Edström, who represents one of the men.
The charges against four men in their 20s include aggravated assault, battery and robbery.
In the first assault, a group of four men unprovokedly assaulted a man with punches and kicks on Kungsgatan.
Just minutes later, a lone man was attacked while he was standing and smoking. Witnesses describe in the investigation how he was hit in the back of the head by a man and fell to the ground. As he lay on the ground, the man and several others continued to attack him with punches and kicks to the body and head. The violence resulted in him losing several teeth, among other things.
He himself does not remember anything about the incident and cannot understand why someone attacked him, he says during questioning.
Shortly afterwards, another man was assaulted on the subway by three men. The entire incident was caught on surveillance camera, where the perpetrators' faces are clearly visible, and shows them jumping on the man without provocation, punching and kicking him.
