The incident, which occurred in Töcksfors near the Swedish border with Norway last November, saw the elderly Norwegian woman narrowly escape death after the attacker threw an axe at her head, only for the blunt side to connect.

“She was extremely lucky. If it had rotated half a turn it would have connected with the sharp edge,” Värmland police officer Christer Magnusson said at the time.

She and her husband had been driving through the town when a car approached and tried to overtake them. Instead, it drove into a lamppost, and after the couple stopped, a man emerged from the crashed vehicle, asked to be handed weapons from a woman he was travelling with, then attacked the elderly pair.

The Norwegian woman fled and was chased into a nearby candy store, where the attacker threw an axe at her. She turned her head just before the axe connected, meaning it struck her in the back of the skull rather than the front. In questioning, she said she thought her ability to keep walking after being struck was the only reason she was not killed by the man, newspaper Göteborgs Posten reports.

He then turned his attention to her husband, threatening him with a knife several times after he ran into the store to help. The attacker eventually fled in the couple's car, which was later found partially destroyed.

The 46-year-old, a resident of Kungälv in western Sweden, claimed that he had crashed his car into a streetlight because the Norwegian couple failed to signal at a turn.

Värmland district court sentenced him to six years in prison for attempted murder, attempted aggravated assault, unlawful threats and negligence in traffic.

He will also have to pay around 130,000 kronor ($14,417) in damages to the Norwegian couple.

During the investigation it emerged that the man, along with the woman he was travelling with, had been living at a youth hostel in Töcksfors around the time of the crime.

The woman who gave him the axe was cleared of all charges because according to the district court, it was not possible to prove that she knew what the man would do with the weapons.