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SIGTUNA CHILD MURDERS

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Mother convicted of drowning young sons

The 31-year-old mother who pushed her two young sons into a lake in central Sweden and watched them drown was convicted of murder on Monday and sentenced to closed psychiatric care and deportation.

Published: 19 March 2012 14:31 CET

Mother convicted of drowning young sons

The court ruled that as the woman had been thinking about ending her sons’ lives a week before she watched them die, she should be convicted of murder rather than manslaughter.

4-year-old Elias and 8-year-old Tevin were found dead in the water near the Munkholmen swimming area in Sigtuna, near Stockholm, in late September.

Suspicions were soon directed toward the boys’ 31-year-old mother.

The mother had been becoming increasingly unstable during the weeks prior to the tragic incident and she was experiencing severe financial problems.

After first denying she had killed the boys, the mother later admitted to pushing her kids into the water and watching them drown.

“Tevin didn’t scream but Elias screamed for a long time. It was loud and he shouted ‘no, no, no’,” the mother revealed during interrogations, according to daily Aftonbladet.

She also claimed that she had meant to drown herself as well.

“We were all supposed to die,” said the woman, according to the paper.

Since her arrest in the autumn last year she has been held at a secure psychiatric ward at Huddinge sjukhus, in southern Stockholm.

Two medical examinations have since confirmed that the woman has serious mental problems.

TT/The Local/rm

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Half of Viking city of Sigtuna were immigrants: study

An 11th century skeleton found in Sigtuna. Photo: Stockholm University

While rough half of the 38 people whose bones and teeth were genetically tested grew up in or around the nearby Lake Mälaren area, the other half came from as far away as Ukraine, Lithuania, northern Germany, the British Isles, and parts of central Europe, as well as from southern Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

“It was a sort of Viking Age Scandinavian Shanghai or London,” Anders Götherström, Professor of Molecular Archeology at Stockholm University, told the TT newswire. “Anyone who wanted to do something, to work their way up in the church or in politics were first forced to come to Sigtuna.”

Now a picturesque lakeside town with a well-known private boarding school, Sigtuna was one of Sweden’s first cities, founded in 980AD by the country’s first Christian king Olof Skötkonung.

It soon grew into a major settlement of around 10,000 people, roughly the same population as Anglo-Saxon London.

The study, the largest of its kind so far carried out in Sweden, combined DNA analysis and strontium analysis of teeth to build a detailed picture of where the people had come from.

The results have been published in an article in Current Biology, Genomic and Strontium Isotope Variation Reveal Immigration Patterns in a Viking Age Town.

Maja Krzewinska, the researcher at Stockholm University who was the study's primary author, said that it showed that Vikings had not only been emigrants and invaders.

“We're used to thinking of the Vikings as a travelling kind, and can easily picture the school books with maps and arrows pointing out from Scandinavia, as far as Turkey and America, but not so much in the other direction,” she said in a press release issued by the university.

The project is part of the ATLAS-project which plans to use ‘deep-sequence analysis’ to shine light on the demographic history of Sweden.

“I especially like that we find second-generation immigrants among the buried,” Götherström, one of the project’s leaders, said in the release. “That kind of migratory information has never been encountered before as far as I know.”

The study found that approximately 70 per cent of the female population were immigrants, and about 44 per cent of the men.

Götherström told TT that the Atlas project underlined the fact that, genetically, there was no such thing as an ethnic Swede.

“The Swede doesn't exist genetically,” he said, “We've pieced ourselves together from parts taken from the whole world, and the more we study this genetically, the more we see that people have been moving around the place the whole time.”

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