A deepening scandal in Sweden has revealed a pattern of sexual assaults — including rape — carried out against elderly women, some aged over 80, by migrant care workers who in several cases deliberately sought employment in the sector to gain access to vulnerable victims, with authorities and care providers accused of covering up crimes rather than reporting them.
The cases, spread across multiple Swedish cities and municipalities, bear disturbing similarities to the grooming gang scandal in Britain — a comparison drawn explicitly by Spiked, which published a detailed investigation into the pattern in April 2025. As in the UK, those in positions of institutional authority are accused of downplaying or suppressing allegations, with political sensitivity over the backgrounds of perpetrators appearing to play a role in the slow response.
Among the most serious individual cases is that of Baasim Yusuf, a Somali-origin care worker in his mid-twenties operating in Uppsala, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for raping and sexually assaulting at least four elderly women aged between 77 and 88 in their own homes. He filmed parts of the assaults. He was allowed to continue working after initial complaints were raised, creating multiple victims before being removed. The institutional breakdown in Uppsala was so severe that the entire elderly care committee resigned when the full scale of failures emerged. In October 2025, a 100-year-old woman was raped in her home in the Stockholm region by an Iraqi home-care worker in his late thirties during a routine care visit.
In Umeå, a 33-year-old Iraqi man, who had been in Sweden since 2015 on a series of temporary residence permits, was arrested and charged with raping and sexually assaulting three elderly women. He had not been dismissed despite complaints of sexual harassment made against him by staff and had been unable to speak Swedish throughout his employment.
In Örebro, a 22-year-old Syrian man, Al Khleef Almasalmeh, who had arrived as an asylum seeker in 2015 and obtained Swedish citizenship in 2018, was charged with the systematic abuse of at least 13 elderly patients — some in their 90s, one aged 99 — filming himself humiliating and tormenting them while shouting religious taunts. Despite a prior criminal record for violent gang-related offences including a pistol-point assault on Swedish youths, he was hired by the municipality in March 2025. After a police investigation began, he was suspended for only one month before being allowed to return to work with elderly patients until his arrest in January 2026. Two of his victims have since died.
A Bulletin.nu investigation found that of 17 examined cases of staff-perpetrated abuse in elder care, ten — or 59 per cent — involved perpetrators with foreign backgrounds, a significant overrepresentation compared to their approximately 29 per cent share of the care assistant workforce. An official investigation into rapes of the elderly found that most non-marital rapes since 2021 were committed by home care or municipal nursing home staff, with most perpetrators being migrants. In several cases, municipalities were directly complicit in covering up incidents or attempting to silence victims. Caregivers reported for rape were in some cases reassigned rather than dismissed, and allowed to continue working with other patients.
Until the scandal broke, many if not all Swedish municipalities did not carry out any criminal record checks on prospective care workers — a failure that allowed individuals with prior allegations or convictions to enter the sector and gain unsupervised access to some of the country’s most vulnerable people.
Expert Johanna Läth has warned that the number of unreported cases is likely significantly higher than official figures suggest, given the extreme vulnerability of victims — many of whom have dementia, frailty or cognitive impairment that prevents them from recalling or reporting what has happened to them. Sweden’s elder care sector has come to rely heavily on migrant labour since the mass migration waves of 2015 and after, with workers arriving from Afghanistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria and Iraq taking up positions across the publicly funded system.
Pensioners’ organisations including PRO have demanded urgent national action. Reforms now under discussion include mandatory criminal record checks, stricter vetting, the option for patients to request same-gender intimate care, and tighter hiring standards across municipal contracts.
