Over 30 refugees refused to get off a bus that transported them to temporary accommodation at a holiday park on Sunday because they didn’t want to stay in such a rural location.
Two buses that were full of refugees arrived at the holiday park in Lima in western Sweden on Sunday night, but around 30 passengers refused to leave the vehicle.
Charlotte Jacobsson, a press spokesperson for Sweden’s Migration Board (Migrationsverket) confirmed to The Local that a number of the asylum seekers had felt uncomfortable being surrounded by so much forest.
“Yes, that is the information we had from some people,” she said.
“We had a situation where people didn’t want to leave the bus (…) we sent some of our staff there overnight to provide more information,” she further added.
Jacobsson said that the Migration Board understood that some of the refugees had since accepted places inside the holiday park, which has space for 50 individuals, but added that others remained unhappy with their new temporary home.
Some of the travellers are understood to have spent the entire night on the bus.
“We were coming to an area in the middle of the forest we know nothing about, just snow and wind and nothing else,” Esam Taha, one of the Syrian refugees aboard the bus recently told The Local.
But he said that he had gone on to make good friends in the area and planned to stick around.
“This city is a small city and a quiet city, and the people here are really, really nice and I like it, but it’s a big problem to find an apartment,” he explained.
Sweden’s Migration Board said last week that the total number of refugee arrivals in 2015 could reach 190,000.
