Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

CRIME

Swedish youth faces trial for Columbine homage attack plot

A Swedish youth faces trial for allegedly plotting an attack at his old high school on the 20th anniversary of the Columbine massacre in the United States, a leading daily reported Monday.

Published: 24 December 2019 10:00 CET
Swedish youth faces trial for Columbine homage attack plot
Photo: Depositphotos

The 21-year-old was arrested by chance two weeks before April 20, exactly 20 years after two high schoolers killed 12 classmates and a teacher in the small Colorado town.

Police arrested the suspect after a neighbour alerted them over a drunken brawl at his home during which he was waving a machete at a homeless man.

Police found fake firearms as well as explosives and cans of petrol that the suspect allegedly planned to use to set fire to the school library, Dagens Nyheter reported.

The young man, who faces a hefty prison term, admits that he planned an attack but denies having the intention to kill, his lawyer Jan Kryo said told the paper.

However, a diary entry states: “I have always had this desire to kill, I don't know why… I don't want to seem crazy, but I may be a reincarnation of Eric Harris” — one of the two Columbine killers.

Harris, who was 18, and his 17-year-old accomplice Dylan Klebold turned their weapons on themselves after the bloodbath, then the worst school shooting in US history.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

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.

SHOW COMMENTS