Agency Report

A man was arrested over the weekend in Sweden, suspected of flying a drone over the residence of country’s king and queen, police said Monday.

The incident comes as Sweden is experiencing a wave of reported drone flights over sensitive areas.

Swedish police did not confirm the nationality of the man, which newspaper Aftonbladet identified as a Russian man in his 40s, who was arrested around 1 pm (1200 GMT) on Sunday near Drottningholm Castle.

“We just confirm that it was a man who was arrested yesterday,” police spokesman Ola Osterling told AFP.

The castle, located just outside Stockholm, is the residence of King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia.

The unidentified man is suspected of violating a Swedish law regulating protected sites, and the arrest comes two weeks after several flights of drones of unknown origin over nuclear power plants in various parts of Sweden.

The investigations of those flights are being handled by Sweden’s security police Sapo.

In another incident a “military drone” was seen flying over the Swedish parliament and government buildings as well as the royal palace in central Stockholm in mid-January.

These incidents themselves came after armoured vehicles and dozens of armed soldiers were deployed in the streets of Visby, a port city on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, in an unusual move in response to increased “Russian activity” in the region.

However, police also told newspaper Dagens Nyheter that among some 200 incidents of suspicious drone flights no signs of foreign activity had been discovered.

AFP