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Eight years for brother who fatally stabbed sister

The 17-year-old boy from southern Sweden who stabbed his sister to death in April was sentenced to eight years in prison on Tuesday for what the court referred to as an "honour killing".

Published: 29 January 2013 12:08 CET

The boy, who was 16 at the time of the attack, killed his 19-year-old sister in her apartment in Landskrona.

“This is an incredibly harsh sentence. My client is in shock,” the teen’s defence lawyer, Urban Jansson, told the TT news agency.

She was stabbed over 100 times with two different knives and a pair of scissors.

The boy had blamed the attack on a masked man, however the Lund District Court found the claims to be unsubstantiated and inconsistent.

The murder was “among the most serious cases of murder that can be committed” according to the court.

As the boy was only days away from his 17th birthday at the time of the attack, the judge decided to punish him as a 17-year-old rather than as a 16-year-old, altering the sentence therefore from four years to eight years in prison.

A psychiatric evaluation found no reason to place the teen in psychiatric care.

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

In the months before her death, the 19-year-old had been speaking with the women’s support group Tänk Om (‘Think Again’), which works to combat honour violence. They had given her shelter and recorded her claims of abuse.

TT/The Local/og

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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.

READ ALSO: Knife attacker kills man in Paris park before being shot dead by police

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.

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