SUE REID reports as Sweden is engulfed by a crime wave of rape, gang bombings, assassination - and even a reported lynching... Claudia Mayor is a loving mother whose three teenage sons are at the heart of a horrifying story that has appalled and divided Sweden.
In the early spring of 2023, the boys launched a cold-blooded attack on a Middle Eastern migrant who had raped the 15-year-old girlfriend of their younger brother.
It left the 26-year-old migrant hanging lifeless from a rope on a forest tree.
Claudia has never spoken publicly before about the crime, which bore all the hallmarks of a modern-day lynching. It led to the teenagers, then aged between 16 and 18, being convicted of murder – although the convictions were dropped on appeal when the court could not decide exactly how the man died.
But this week, the 46-year-old housewife agreed to talk to the Mail at her small house in Uppsala, an hour's drive from the Swedish capital. 'When I heard what the boys had done to this man, it was beyond belief,' she told me. 'I slapped each of them hard.'
'But,' she added, 'I understand why it happened. Our country is changed and Swedish girls are not safe or protected from the strangers who have been invited in to live among them. Look around you. It's not mostly Swedish faces any more. There are many Arab ones from a different culture. It was not like this when I came as a six-year-old child migrant with my parents.'