Man Blasted Bus Driver With Fire Extinguisher - Court Acquits Him

STOCKHOLM - "Now you get the bus driver!" a 51-year-old man said on a Stockholm bus before emptying a fire extinguisher over the driver. He was charged with four crimes. Now a district court has acquitted him on every count - because he believed he was the one under attack.

It happened on Saturday 1 December 2025, on the number 74 bus towards Sickla Udde. As the bus neared Skansbron, Jani Emil Vikman walked up to the driver's cab, said the words, and sprayed the driver.

"I couldn't breathe. I got out and all the passengers got out," the driver later told police. When he confronted the man outside, Vikman apologised: "Sorry, I didn't mean to do that."

Passengers fell when the bus braked hard, and one woman suffered a concussion. Everyone fled the smoke-filled bus.

Vikman walked off down Skansbrogatan. When police arrived, a passenger helped them track him down.

Alcohol, cocaine and paranoia

In police interviews, he kept insisting it wasn't really him.

"It simply wasn't me. I was under psychological stress. So I can't... I don't know what to say. Because that wasn't me."

Shortly after boarding, he says, he became convinced the driver wanted to kill him. He blamed a heavy intake of alcohol and cocaine, which he said he had been offered at a nearby bar.

Asked why he grabbed the fire extinguisher, he said it was the only way to stop the bus. "It was the only thing I saw." He even remembered warning a young man sitting at the front to hold on - "because now he's going to brake."

After his arrest, officers described him as paranoid. He tried to run out of his cell and claimed that AI was hidden in the floor and walls and that the water was poisoned.

READ MORE: Ekeroth: A Knee to the Head, and Sweden's Leftist Courts Acquit

"Putative self-defence"

Prosecutor Charlotte Nordström charged him in April with violence against a public official, criminal damage, creating danger to others and causing bodily injury.

On 26 October, Stockholm District Court threw out every charge. Vikman did not dispute what happened. But the court accepted that he believed he was facing an imminent criminal attack - what Swedish law calls putative self-defence.

The court found the prosecutor had not proved that belief was unfounded - even though the judges themselves noted that he can be seen smiling as he moves through the bus and fires the extinguisher at the driver.

Nor did they find spraying the driver "manifestly unjustifiable" given the danger Vikman thought he faced. He walks free on all counts.

The same excuse - again

It is the second time in weeks that a Swedish court has reached for the same defence.

In the earlier case, left-wing activist Andreas Klominek was acquitted after kneeing Nick Alinia in the face during a May Day demonstration. Two lay judges from the Social Democrats and one from the Left Party - the latter with ties to the anti-racist group Expo - outvoted the legally trained judge, who wanted to convict.

There too, the court accepted that a crime had been committed. But because Klominek saw Alinia's citizen's arrest as an attack on his son, putative self-defence was said to apply.

READ MORE: Gang Filmed Torture Beating of Swedish Teen - Two Walk Free