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Swedish Police Investigate Report of Rape on Facebook Live

STOCKHOLM — Three men in Uppsala, Sweden, were arrested on Sunday on suspicion of raping a woman and streaming the assault live to a private Facebook group. On Monday, the authorities urged people with access to the images showing the assault to make them available to investigators.

“Police and prosecutors have access to some of the images and video footage,” Magnus Berggren, a prosecutor in Uppsala, said at a news conference, the Swedish newspaper Expressen reported. “What we do not have access to is the segment showing the actual assault.”

Police officers were sent to an apartment in Uppsala, a university city about 40 miles north of Stockholm, shortly before 9 a.m. on Sunday after receiving several calls reporting a rape in progress that was being streamed live to a closed group on Facebook, Expressen reported.

The police arrested three men, 18, 20 and 24, at the apartment, Expressen reported.

“We are gathering evidence, technical evidence, but also interviewing,” Mr. Berggren said at the news conference. “We have questioned a number of people and there will be more interviews.”

While Facebook Live streams occur in real time, the videos can be replayed later by people with access to the page if the person who filmed it chooses that option, until the videos are taken down. There are ways for viewers to record the stream on computers or to take screenshots of it.

A police spokeswoman, Lisa Sannervik, said there were probably many copies of the stream.

“Many have seen this on the internet, and we are eager to prevent any spreading of the movie,” Ms. Sannervik told the Swedish news agency TT.

Christine Chen, a Facebook spokeswoman, said, “This is a hideous crime and we do not tolerate this kind of content on Facebook.”

She added: “If someone does violate our community standards while using Live, we want to interrupt these streams as quickly as possible when they’re reported to us. So we’ve given people a way to report violations during a live broadcast.”

Swedish Television News reported that there might have been two live videos on Facebook, the first showing a rape and the second capturing a man trying to force a woman to deny that she had been raped.

Mr. Berggren, the prosecutor, could not confirm this because the video was not available, Swedish Television News reported.

Images of the suspects are being shared on social media, and hundreds of people are said to have seen the live video, Swedish Television News reported.

Linda Johansson, who lives near Hassleholm in southern Sweden, told Swedish Television News that she started watching the second live video around 8 a.m.

“The girl was sitting in front of the camera while the man who filmed her tried to convince her to deny that she had been raped,” Ms. Johansson told Swedish Television News. “He was putting words into her mouth. He was taunting and laughing throughout the whole clip.”

Over the past year, Facebook has made live, user-generated video a top priority. But the company’s push into live video has not been without disturbing occurrences. In July, three men in Norfolk, Va., were shot as they streamed video on Facebook, less than a week after the death of Philando Castile, whose killing by the police in St. Paul, Minn., was streamed live on Facebook.

Mike Isaac contributed reporting from San Francisco.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Swedish Police Investigate Report of Rape on Facebook Live. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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