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CRIME

84-year-old killed for ‘not lending grandson her car’

Murder charges have been filed against a 22-year-old Swede suspected of killing his 84-year-old grandmother after she refused to let him borrow her car.

The man, a resident of Borås in western Sweden, is suspected of having stabbed and beaten his grandmother in October of last year before suffocating her to death by rolling her head up in a rug, the local Borås Tidningen (BT) reported.

After allegedly killing his grandmother, the man then took her mobile phone and drove off in her car only to later run off the road.

He then called his mother, who came to pick him up.

The 22-year-old then explained that something terrible had happened to his grandmother.

The man’s mother called the police, who subsequently found the 84-year-old with stab wounds and head trauma. She also had her head tightly wrapped up inside a rug.

The 22-year-old was arrested later that evening and remanded in custody several days later.

Investigators found traces of the 22-year-old’s DNA on the shaft of a knife believed to be used in the deadly attack, as well as blood from the 84-year-old grandmother on the man’s clothes.

While the grandson has admitted he was present at his grandmother’s home, he has yet to provide a full account of what took place, despite several interrogations.

The man was said to have a good relationship with his grandmother, but prosecutors believe the 84-year-old’s refusal to lend her car to her grandson, who was under the influence of drugs and alcohol at the time, may have led the 22-year-old to kill her.

“One can only speculate as to why he was so determined to borrow the grandmother’s car. An educated guess could be that drugs may have had something to do with it,” prosecutor Daniel Edsbagge told BT.

In filing the murder charges on Monday, Edsbagge said he believed he had “solid evidence” implicating the 22-year-old in his grandmother’s death.

According to BT, the man had been charged with a number of other crimes earlier in the year, including attempted assault, petty theft, and a number of drug offences.

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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.

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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