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CRIME

Woman admits murder after body found in Dalarna

A 20-year-old woman has confessed killing a woman in her sixties in the Dalarna region in central Sweden.

Published: 4 July 2016 14:53 CEST
Woman admits murder after body found in Dalarna
Police investigating at Långshyttan, Dalarna. Photo: Niklas Hagman/TT

Four out of eight people arrested by police were remanded in custody on Sunday in connection to the suspected murder of a woman found dead near a stream in Långshyttan in Hedemora municipality.

One of them, a 20-year-old woman, admitted killing the older victim according to court documents seen by regional newspaper Dalarnas Tidning (DT). Her lawyer declined to comment when approached by the daily.

A 22-year-old man told Mora District Court that he had helped plan the alleged murder. However, he said he had then had second thoughts and left the scene before “the crime was started or completed”, reported DT.

A third man, 44, who was also remanded in custody on suspicion of murder, denied the allegations.

A 24-year-old man is understood to have confessed to being linked in part to the woman's death.

“He has admitted that he was involved, but I don't want to go into detail on what he admits. There will be an extensive investigation with many interrogations, and it will become a bit more clear what his role was,” his lawyer Carl-Oscar Morgården told the paper.

A total of eight people form part of the investigation, suspected of various degrees of involvement, including harbouring a criminal, accessory to murder and murder. Police initially arrested seven, but an eighth person handed himself over to officers on Sunday.

The woman was reported missing on June 28th by relatives in Borlänge and, after an initial investigation, police became convinced the woman had been murdered. They would not expand on why, but do not believe the victim was killed where she was found.

“There were many people involved, and it has been a long time, we think, since the crime was committed, so we have many places to explore,” said a police spokesman on Sunday.

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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