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Swede convicted of double murder after DNA match 16 years later

A Swedish court convicted a 37-year-old man on Thursday over a 2004 double murder that went unsolved until police matched his DNA on a popular genealogy website.

Published: 1 October 2020 13:45 CEST
Swede convicted of double murder after DNA match 16 years later
Daniel Nyqvist who has been convicted of double murder in Linköping 2004. Photo: Polisen/TT

Daniel Nyqvist confessed killing an eight-year-old boy and a 56-year old woman shortly after his arrest in June.

Nyqvist, who was found to have “committed the acts under the influence of a severe psychological disorder” was sentenced to psychiatric care.

The two victims, unrelated to each other, were stabbed one morning in the quiet town of Linköping.

Investigators struggled to come up with either a suspect or a motive, despite finding the suspect's DNA at the scene, the murder weapon, a bloody cap and witness descriptions of a young man with blond hair.

Police even called upon the FBI for help, but to no avail. Over the years, the case file grew to become the second biggest in Sweden's history, after that of the 1986 murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme.

The case was finally cracked when new legislation in January 2019 allowed police to search for DNA matches of not only the perpetrator but also family members.

After exhausting the police's own DNA database they started looking on commercial genealogy websites, which are popular among Swedes seeking long-lost relatives.

“We received a match almost immediately. And several months later, the suspect was arrested. His DNA was taken and matched 100 percent,” police said in a statement the day after his arrest.

Aged 21 at the time of the murders, Nyqvist has spoken about having obsessive thoughts about killing and said that he chose his victims randomly.

The young boy was selected as Nyqvist saw him as an easy target and after stabbing the child he went after the woman, who had been passing and had witnessed the attack.

An unemployed loner who liked to play computer games, Nyqvist seldom ventured out of his parents' house, where he was living at the time of the murders.

According to investigators, he continued to live a secluded life near Linköping since the killings.

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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.

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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