A child sex scandal has rocked a small community in Lapland as Norwegian police uncover 151 alleged sexual assaults including 43 rapes.
An investigation was launched after a local paper last year published testimonies of 11 men and women claiming to have been assaulted in Tysfjord, a municipality above the Arctic Circle with less than 2,000 inhabitants.
A new police report said the assault cases were dropped mainly because too much time had passed. Some of the cases date as far back as 1953. The report identified 82 victims, aged between four and 75, and 92 suspects. Most were members of the indigenous Sami community, formerly known as the Lapps, and many were also followers of Laestadianism, a conservative Lutheran revival movement.
Ten people have been charged and others could follow, officers said.
'The police have no reason to believe that ethnicity or religious beliefs are an explanation to the assaults that took place,' police officer Tone Vangen told a news conference. Source
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