Engla’s killer ‘will face jail’

Anders Eklund, the man who has confessed to the murders of Engla Juncosa Höglund, 10, and Pernilla Hellgren, 31, is likely to face a lengthy prison sentence after the results of a psychiatric evaluation deemed him not to be seriously mentally ill.

Published: 4 September 2008 09:48 CEST

The National Board of Health and Welfare’s legal committee announced on Thursday that Eklund had a minor mental illness at the time of both attacks.

His psychiatric state was not serious enough to warrant placing him in psychiatric care, said the committee.

Engla Juncosa Höglund disappeared on Saturday, April 5th, a few hundred metres from her home in Sjärnsund in north-central Sweden. Two days later Eklund was arrested at a roadside pub in Hallandsåsen in southwest Sweden on suspicions of kidnapping.

Six days later, Eklund admitted to killing the girl and to having raped and killed Pernilla Hellgren in Falun eight years earlier.