When contemplating current realities in the insane asylum known as Sweden, the mind boggles.

I’ll give you a précis of what happened in Södertälje last Thursday. It will make you exclaim, “Baron, you must be making all this up!”

I assure you I’m not:

Many thanks to Gary Fouse for translating this article from Nyheter Idag:

Correctional officer transport chief on armed escorts: “Great risk of escalation”

Joacim Trybom, head of the prison transport unit, says in SVT’s Aktuellt that police escorts or armed personnel to prevent armed releases of prisoners would risk an “escalation” between the justice system and criminal gangs.

On Thursday, the 17-year-old murderer Frunze Saghatelyan was freed by armed persons when he was being transported by corrections guards to a dentist in Södertälje.

Saghatelyan, who is an Armenian citizen and received Swedish citizenship while he was on the run abroad from Swedish police, was sentenced to juvenile custody for two years and eleven months for the murder of MED politician Fredrik Andersson at the Delat Gym in Stockholm in March of last year, as well as an aggravated weapons offense and for bombing a restaurant.

The freeing of Saghatelyan is the second armed freeing in a short time, and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson (M) called the freeing “scandalous” in Parliament on Thursday.

“I think it is scandalous that a person who could take another person’s life can simply walk away with the help of armed friends,” said Kristersson, who asked what the correctional officers did and did not do.

On Thursday evening, Joacim Trybom, head of the correctional transport unit, participated in an interview with Aktuellt on SVT [Swedish State TV] regarding the freeing of the prisoner and said, among other things, that corrections personnel are only armed with OC spray, and therefore can do nothing against armed liberators.

“We have OC spray as our weapon, but when someone shows up with firearms, we don’t stand much of a chance of doing anything. As we stated earlier in the feature, our procedure for issuing firearms is considerably tougher than for our OC spray.”

Trybom also says that they did not request a police escort for Saghatelyan’s transport because they had no indications that a freeing operation was planned. The moderator for Aktuellt then asked if the freeing would have happened had there been a police escort.

“That is a good question. They might have been scared off, or it could have gotten even worse. When both sides have weapons, there is a great risk of escalation,” says Trybom and continues:

“In today’s situation, there was no escalation and nobody was injured. But if we had had reinforcements with weapons, there would have been escalation on both sides, and we don’t know how that would go.”

When Aktuellt asked about a suggestion by Richard Jomshof (Sweden Democrats) to arm correctional transport officers, Trybom said that would be “a very sharp escalation.”

“There are other countries that have armed personnel when they conduct transports, so that is not an impossibility, but it is also a sharp escalation. I don’t know if society is ready for us to have personnel in a hospital or other facilities when we conduct armed transports.”