Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

STABBING

Brother on trial for stabbing sister to death

The murder trial of a 17-year-old boy suspected of fatally stabbing his 19-year-old sister more than 100 times with two knives and a pair of scissors started in southern Sweden on Monday.

Published: 26 November 2012 11:12 CET
Brother on trial for stabbing sister to death

The sister had previously claimed she was forcibly married off at age 15 and raped.

The boy was arrested in April after calling the police to tell them he had found his older sister Maria dead in her apartment in Landskrona in southern Sweden.

When formal charges were filed earlier in November, prosecutor Magnus Larsson said that the 17-year-old denied having committed the crime.

The brother claimed Maria was killed by a masked perpetrator.

He also said that his dying sister begged him to call a friend for help, which he did, before then calling police.

But in a packed hearing room at the Lund District Court on Monday, the prosecutor accused the boy of lying, and presented evidence that she could not have expressed her last wishes to him.

“The medical examiner found that her windpipe had been cut. Therefore, she couldn’t have spoken with her brother,” Larsson told the court.

Just days before her death, she made a recording, which was played in court on Monday.

“When I was 15, I was raped and married off,” Maria could be heard saying.

She had been speaking with the women’s support group Tänk Om (‘Think Again’), which works to combat honour violence. They had given Maria shelter in the months before her death and recorded her claims of abuse.

In the more than 30-minute long tape, she spoke at length about the notion of “family honour” that permeated her upbringing.

She then details being kidnapped and taken abroad as a 12-year-old.

In the recording, she says she fled back to Sweden when she was 15 but was forced to live with threats and harassment.

“She was constantly worried about being murdered. She felt that there were plans being hatched against her, and that fear proved to be justified,” Newroz Zeynep Ötunc of Tank Om told the TT news agency.

Maria was found with more than 100 stab wounds to her head, abdomen, back, and neck.

In making his case, prosecutor Larsson pointed to forensic evidence implicating Maria’s brother, including cuts on his hands.

The 17-year-old’s fingerprints were also found on one of the knives and his sister’s blood was found on his clothes.

Police found two knives and a pair of scissors near the victim’s body.

“The blade on one of the knives was bent sharply. The bending probably occurred due to stabs to the body,” said Larsson, who showed the court several images of blood-stained walls and pools of blood on the floor of Maria’s flat.

While police and prosecutors have investigated Maria’s murder as an honour killing, they have not found proof that the killing was orchestrated by her family, as alleged by representatives from Tänk Om and others.

“It’s possible to prove that Maria lived within an honour culture and that the accused and the rest of the family had opinions about her way of life,” Elisabeth Massi Fritz, an attorney representing Maria’s sister, told TT.

“It’s unfortunate that the prosecutor doesn’t see the honour culture problem. My client thinks it’s important to highlight it during the proceedings.”

Early in the investigation, Maria’s mother was also arrested on suspicion that she had a role in the killing. She was later released.

Last week, she told the Aftonbladet newspaper she would “never forgive” her son if it turns out that he killed his sister.

TT/The Local/dl

Follow The Local on Twitter

STABBING

French prosecutor says Paris suburb stabbing treated as suspected terror attack

French anti-terrorist investigators said on Saturday they have taken over the probe into an attack by a knife-wielding man in a park south of Paris.

Published: 5 January 2020 07:18 CET
French prosecutor says Paris suburb stabbing treated as suspected terror attack
A police forensic team at the scene of the attack in Villejuif. Photo: Christophe Archambault/AFP
The man killed one person walking with his wife before being shot dead by police.
 
Police said the man, identified as 22-year-old Nathan C., attacked several people around lunchtime Friday in the suburb of Villejuif and they initially treated the incident as a criminal not terrorist incident.
   
But in a statement, the French national anti-terrorist investigation body (PNAT) said that while Nathan C. was known to have had psychiatric problems, worrying evidence had also emerged about his conversion to Islam and radicalisation.
   
“Investigations over the past few hours have allowed us to establish that he was certainly radicalised (and to show)… organised preparation for his move towards the act,” the statement said.
   
Additionally, they “showed a murderous path, thought out and chosen, of such a nature as to gravely disturb public order by intimidation or terror,” it said.
 
 
Earlier a local magistrate told a press conference that Nathan C. had shouted the Muslim invocation “Allahu Akbar” (God is Greatest) during the attack.
   
Nathan C. converted to Islam in mid-2017 and is believed to have suffered serious psychiatric problems since he was child, with several spells in hospital. In June he stopped receiving the treatment he was being given.
   
Police found literature characterised as Salafist in a bag after the attack, Philippe Bugeaud of the Paris investigative police told the press conference.
   
There was also a letter “with phrases fairly typical of a Muslim man who self-flagellates and who knows that he may be about to take the plunge,” Bugeaud added.
   
Nathan C.'s apartment in Paris also bore “every sign that it was going to be no longer lived in,” magistrate Laure Beccuau said.
   
Nathan C. apparently spared a first person who said he was a Muslim and had recited a prayer in Arabic, she said.
   
He then attacked the couple, killing the husband and seriously injuring the wife before wounding a woman jogger in the back. Beccuau said the two women had now left hospital.
   
France remains on high alert after being hit by a string of attacks by jihadist extremists since 2015, with more than 250 people killed in total.
SHOW COMMENTS