Climate change protester Greta Thunberg was bodily removed from a multi-day road-blocking protest at a Swedish port by police as they cleared space for fuel trucks to get through, and may charge the activist with trespass.
A protest at the port of Malmo, Sweden, is now in its sixth day and has seen youth affiliated with the Ta tillbaka framtiden (‘Take back the future’) group block roads, sit on top of fuel tankers, and scale buildings to disrupt operations. One attendee at the protest over several days is Greta Thunberg, the 20-year-0ld Swede lionised around the world for her school-strike protests and who was pictured sitting on the ground in Malmo in front of a waiting fuel truck while holding a protest sign.
Photographs from a Swedish news agency published Monday showed Thunberg being physically carried away from the road by police officers.
#GALLERY: Greta Thunberg has been arrested following a climate demonstration in Malmo, Sweden.
The 20-year-old took to Twitter a day before being detained stating, “the climate crisis is a matter of life and death for countless people.” #9News pic.twitter.com/bBdsMIp9RQ
— 9News Australia (@9NewsAUS) June 20, 2023
British newspaper The Daily Telegraph claimed Thunberg had been “arrested” at the protest, yet Swedish media makes no mention of an arrest. Rather, Swedish top-selling newspaper Aftonbladet reports their police sources who say officers are considering charging Thunberg with one count of trespass and three of disobeying a lawful order by a police officer.
Per Aftonbladet, the protesters were asked to leave and refused, leading officers to “move” those sitting on the road to allow traffic to start moving again.
The police action to clear the road was only temporarily successful, however, with the protest group claiming a sixth day of protest on Tuesday and saying that police had once again dragged “young people away” from “the sixth blockade of the week”. Those removed evidently were again disobeying orders to stay out of the road, as the group noted shortly after the removal: “now everyone is back out on the road” and that there was a “long queue of tankers” after two protesters climbed onto one of the trucks.
Today, for the third day in a row, @TTFramtiden blocked oil tankers in the Malmö oil harbour. The climate crisis is a matter of life and death for countless people. We choose to physically stop fossil fuel infrastructure. We are reclaiming the future. #TaTillbakaFramtiden pic.twitter.com/CTXVKR0Qsi
— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) June 17, 2023
This is not, by far, the first time Thunberg has had police physically lift her to clear a sit of protest. Just this year, Thunberg has already been carried by police at a wind turbine protest in Norway, and at a coal protest in Germany.
The German protest generated headlines at the time after police officers were apparently pictured standing and posting with Thunberg, leading to accusations her arrest and physical removal was little more than a staged photo opportunity. German police reacted angrily to the accusations, despite the widely-shared video from the scene, insisting there was a “mundane” operational reason for standing with a smiling Thunberg and that the situation was being weaponised by those with “political motives”.
Despite having to erase her own hair-raising predictions of the end of the world as they fail to amterialise, Thunberg has lost none of her ardent spirit, saying earlier this month she has decided to graduate from school protests. As reported and in her own words, she has only just “begun to fight”.