The grim discovery happened on Monday when a worker was sent out to the farm in Hörby, southern Sweden, to drain sludge from a well and instead found a plastic bag full of bones.
“It was about 160 centimetres tall and had the shape of a human. I would like to think it's an animal but unfortunately it probably isn't. It looks too much like a body,” the worker, Peter Åhlin, told the Aftonbladet tabloid at the time.
Police confirmed his suspicions on Friday. “The coroner has confirmed that the skeletal parts come from a human, probably a man,” they said in a statement published online.
The farm had been abandoned since 2011 when the previous owner moved out.
A Malmö-based couple bought it in November 2014 and eventually started to clear scrap and waste from the yard, including from the well where the bones were found.
Police are now going through records of people who have gone missing in the area.
“One of our priorities is to establish the identity [of the person]. At the moment we don't know when the murder took place,” police investigator Peter Hansson told the regional tabloid Kvällsposten.
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