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CRIME

Rwandan genocide suspect to be tried in Sweden

Rwandan authorities have requested the extradition of a man in his 50s wanted on genocide charges who is currently being held at a remand centre in Sweden.

Published: 18 August 2008 15:19 CEST

The 52-year-old man is suspected of having murdered a family of 25 in April 1994.

The suspect has been detained in Sweden for about a month, following eleven months in a Danish prison. The man was jailed in Denmark for the same crime, but released because of lack of evidence.

The Rwandan Prosecutor-General has requested that the suspect be extradited to Rwanda.

The Rwandan extradition request was contained in a highly confidential 150-page document and had to be translated before being sent to the Swedish Prosecutor-General, Riksåklagaren (RÅ).

RÅ now has eight days to demand that the district court arrest the man and bring the case to Sweden’s Supreme Court.

District prosecutor Lars Hedvall detained the man in July and told the TT news agency that the man is in custody because of an international arrest warrant out on his name.

Hedvall did not want to go into any detail regarding the crimes of which the man is accused.

The suspect is due to be tried at Solna district court, just outside Stockholm.

CRIME

Sweden charges Islamic State woman in landmark trial

Swedish prosecutors said they have brought genocide charges against a woman in the country's first court case over crimes committed by the Islamic State group against the Yazidi minority.

Published: 20 September 2024 07:15 CEST
Sweden charges Islamic State woman in landmark trial

A prosecutor told AFP the 52-year-old woman was accused of keeping Yazidi women and children as slaves at her home in Syria between 2014 and 2016.

She was charged with “genocide, crimes against humanity and serious war crimes” on the grounds that her actions formed part of a broader campaign by the group (IS or Isis) against the Kurdish-speaking Yazidi minority.

The woman, who is a Swedish citizen, is in jail having already been sentenced by a Swedish court to six years in prison in 2022 for allowing her 12-year-old son to be recruited as a child soldier for Isis.

Senior prosecutor Reena Devgun told AFP that while investigating that case, authorities had received witness reports “that told us that she had kept slaves in Raqqa,” the former stronghold of the Islamic State group in northern Syria, prompting further investigations.

“If you take in Yazidis into your household when you are an Isis member or the wife of an Isis member and treat them this way, I argue that you are participating” in the broader campaign against them, Devgun said.

Devgun said the woman had kept nine people, three women and six children, in her home “as slaves”.

The women and children – who were kept in the house for between 20 days and seven months – were among other things made to perform household tasks.

Devgun said they had also been photographed, which the prosecutor argued “was done with the intention that they would be sold off”.

Evidence had mainly been gathered through witness accounts, from the victims and others that had visited the home at the time.

The crimes, which the woman denies, can carry a life sentence in Sweden.

Stockholm’s District Court said in a statement that the trial was scheduled to start on October 7th and was expected to last two months.

Around 300 Swedes or Swedish residents, a quarter of them women, joined IS in Syria and Iraq, mostly in 2013 and 2014, according to Sweden’s intelligence service Säpo.

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