30 November 2023 , 21:52
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A 15-year-old girl and her four teenage brothers in Sweden have been jailed after they killed a taxi driver she had accused of rape.
The court in Uppsala, near Stockholm, found that the victim, 26, was lured into a nature reserve near Enkoping on March 24 with the promise of "sexual favours" before he was overpowered and his body was found hanged a week later. The unnamed four brothers, between the ages of 15 and 18, strangled and hanged the taxi driver with a noose made of rope they bought the day before, the court judged. On trial, all five pleaded their innocence, but the girl admitted she believed the brothers were just going to beat him up. Despite denying involvement, the court's circumstantial evidence led to their conviction.
The eldest brother, aged 18 at the time, was given a life sentence. The four others, all minors at the time of the events, were sentenced to between three and four years in a young offenders' institution. The three older brothers were found guilty of murder. But the girl and her boyfriend, who were 15 when the murder took place, were found not to have been at the scene and were convicted of aiding and abetting the murder.
The court also concluded that his killers had sought to disguise the death as a suicide. On 20 March, four days before the victim disappeared, the girl wrote to a friend: "His brothers are going to meet my rapist." One of the brothers wrote: "We should do Friday [the day of the murder]," to which another brother replied: "OK." After the killing, one of the brothers used the victim's mobile phone to transfer money from his bank account.
The girl allegedly texted the taxi driver, asking him to meet her with a bottle of vodka in a car park. Prosecutors said his death would likely have caused severe suffering and his car was later found 1, 500 metres away from his body and covered in snow with the taxi's metre still running, LBC reported. Lars Holmgard, president of the Uppsala District Court, ruled that the brothers had planned to murder the man at least from the time that they purchased the rope found where he died.
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Evidence presented also included phone signals and traces of DNA from both the driver and the brothers, found on a jacket. "Together, this cumulative evidence made it beyond reasonable doubt that all the defendants were guilty," Uppsala District Court said in a statement yesterday.