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CRIME

Reports dead girl is missing 16-year-old asylum seeker

Several Swedish media are reporting that a female found dead in a forest area in southern Stockholm could be a 16-year-old girl who had sought asylum in the Nordic country.

Published: 2 June 2016 17:09 CEST
Reports dead girl is missing 16-year-old asylum seeker
Police examining the location where the body was found. Photo: Pontus Lundahl/TT

The body was found on Monday after a dog walker spotted an arm sticking out from the moss in a forest area of the Hökarängen suburb of the Swedish capital.

Police launched a murder investigation after forensic teams found that her death may have been suspicious.

The girl has not been formally identified, but several Swedish newspapers reported on Thursday afternoon that she is understood to be a 16-year-old asylum seeker.

The Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper wrote that the girl, from Afghanistan, was reported missing by her boyfriend and the refugee home where she was staying on March 20th.

According to unnamed sources cited by the Swedish daily, police are investigating a theory that there could be an “honour motive” behind her suspected murder.

“We have been told by the police not to talk to anyone about what has happened,” a worker at the asylum home where the young girl was staying told the Aftonbladet tabloid.

Police lead investigator Daniel Edlund and prosecutor Tomas Malmenby both declined to comment during the ongoing investigation when approached by DN.

No one had been arrested by Thursday afternoon.

Sweden took in more than 35,000 underage asylum seekers arriving in the country without their parents in 2015, around 23,000 of whom came from Afghanistan.

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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