(JTA) — Swedish police discovered what they described as a well-made fake bomb at the Chabad House in the southern city of Gothenburg.
The mock bomb was found last week on Saturday, according to a report posted that day on the police’s website. Police came to inspect the premises following a report of a suspicious-looking man who left an unidentified object there.
“Police bomb technicians shot at box that appeared to be a well-made dummy,” the report read. “Police wrote a report on serious unlawful threats.” The report spoke of a Jewish-owned establishment without mentioning specifically the Chabad House, which was nonetheless identified as the target by the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism.
Chabad envoys and other individuals who are recognizable as Jews have suffered repeated assaults in Malmo and Gothenburg. The local communities attribute most such acts to extremists from the southern Swedish cities’ sizable Muslim communities.
Earlier this month, the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention said it has recorded 6,270 hate crimes last year nationally — an all-time high that came as a result of a 14-percent increase over 2013.
Four percent of the hate crimes documented, or 270 incidents, were anti-Semitic, according to the report, which was published Tuesday.
Sweden’s Jewish population of 20,000 accounts for 0.2 percent of the country’s population of 9.59 million people.
In absolute terms, the 2014 tally on anti-Semitic attacks constitutes a 29 percent increase over the 193 anti-Semitic incidents recorded in 2013. But the proportion of anti-Semitic attacks in the tally of all hate crimes grew last year over 2013 only by half a percentage point, from 3.5 percent.
Hate crimes against Christians increased from 321 in 2013 (5.8 percent of the total of 5,508 hate crimes recorded that year) to 489 incidents last year, or 7.7 percent of the 2014 total.
Anti-Muslim crimes were also on the rise, from 327 incidents in 2013 to 492 last year.
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