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PRISON GUARD KILLING

JAIL

Life sentence the ‘only option’: prosecutor

Prosecutors are demanding life imprisonment in the ongoing case of the 28-year-old who killed a female guard at the Flemingsberg remand facility south of Stockholm.

Life sentence the 'only option': prosecutor

The accused, who has refused to answer questions, has admitted to his crimes, and understands that he will be spending a long time behind bars, according to his lawyer Lars Hedsäter.

“But he wants a fixed sentence,” Hedsäter said.

However, prosecutor Mark Hankkio was adamant that for an attack of such brutality only a life sentence would be appropriate.

On Friday, the Södertälje District Court was shown a film behind closed doors recorded by internal security cameras in the prison.

The film reportedly shows the accused raining more than 50 blows on the 25-year-old guard with her own baton, in an attack lasting over a minute and a half.

Despite being rushed to hospital, the woman died less than an hour later.

The attack, which took place in the exercise yard, was seen by several witnesses.

One prisoner described how he was on the other side of the yard when he saw the warden approaching the 28-year-old. Suddenly he heard her screaming and saw her being attacked.

“I saw the bastard beating her, he just punched and punched and punched,”he said.

“I couldn’t continue watching.”

Speaking about the attack at the time, criminology professor Jerzy Sarnecki from Stockholm University said the incident was a “unique event”.

“I can’t remember a similar case like this and I’ve been working in criminology for 35 years now,” he told the TT news agency

He added that Swedish remand centres are some of the most dangerous workplaces around.

An older female guard, who had rushed to try and save her young colleague, revealed that she has been on sick leave with severe stress symptoms ever since the incident, adding that she is too frightened to even go down to the laundry room.

Her impression of the inmate was of someone devoid of emotion.

“He was completely empty. He answered when spoken to, but that was it. Like a cardboard cutout,” she said to TT.

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NORWAY

Body found in Oslo flat nine years after death

A man lay dead in his flat for nine years before being discovered in December, police in Oslo have said.

Body found in Oslo flat nine years after death
Photo by pichet wong from Pexels

The man, who was in his sixties, had been married more than once and also had children, national broadcaster NRK reports.

His name has been kept anonymous. According to neighbours he liked to keep to himself and when they didn’t see him, they thought he had moved or been taken to assisted living.

“Based on the details we have, it is obviously a person who has chosen to have little contact with others,” Grethe Lien Metild, chief of Oslo Police District, told NRK.

His body was discovered when a caretaker for the building he was living in requested police open the apartment so he could carry out his work.

“We have thought it about a lot, my colleagues and people who have worked with this for many years. This is a special case, and it makes us ask questions about how it could happen,” Metild said.

Police believe the man died in April 2011, based on a carton of milk and a letter that were found in his apartment. An autopsy has shown he died of natural causes.

READ ALSO: Immigrants in Norway more likely to be affected by loneliness

His pension was suspended in 2018 when the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV) could not get in touch with him, but his bills were still paid out of his bank account and suspended pension fund.

Arne Krokan, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, said the man’s death would have unlikely gone unnoticed for so long if he had died 30 years ago.

“In a way, it is the price we have paid to get digital services,” he said to NRK.

Last year 27 people were found in Oslo, Asker or Bærum seven days or more after dying. The year before the number was 32 people. Of these, one was dead for almost seven months before being discovered.

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