Published on •Updated
A senior Swedish diplomat serving as special envoy to Syria was charged on Friday with unauthorised possession of classified documents which could have jeopardised Sweden’s national security in the hands of a foreign power, prosecutors said.
“This concerns highly-classified information that the defendant has unlawfully handled by taking home and then keeping the documents containing classified information in his residence and holiday home,” prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said in a statement.
The diplomat gained access to the classified information “through his previous duties, but which he then took with him without authorisation and subsequently appropriated as his own.”
According to the charge sheet, “disclosing the information to a foreign power may be detrimental to Sweden’s security.”
However, the diplomat acted “without any intention of serving a foreign power,” it said.
The diplomat, who was arrested in May 2025, had also been suspected of transmitting classified documents to a former politician from the central Swedish town of Gävle, but prosecutors have closed that investigation due to lack of evidence, Ljungkvist said.
In May last year, Sweden’s security service Sapo carried out raids on the diplomat’s two homes.
Disguised as construction workers, they raided his home at dawn and arrested him and another person. That person is no longer considered a suspect.
The arrests came the same day that another diplomat, Joachim Bergstrom, was arrested suspected of spying in another dramatic raid by security services.
Masked agents burst into Bergstrom’s apartment and pulled him out in his pyjamas.
Less than 48 hours later, after he had been released from custody but was still considered a suspect, he killed himself.
Thomas Olsson, the lawyer for the diplomat charged on Friday, told the AFP news agency his client “denies these acts and maintains that the allegations are completely unfounded.”
“My client has worked at the foreign service for decades and handled tens of thousands of different documents, including these ones,” he said.
The question of whether his client should have had the documents in his possession at his residences was a matter of foreign ministry procedure, he said.
“If you don’t follow the internal rules, at most it’s a disciplinary matter. It’s hardly something you should be using the Security Service to enforce.”
Additional sources • AFP