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CRIME

Man sentenced for killing ‘noisy’ neighbour

A 39-year-old man from Karlskrona in southern Sweden who admitted to stabbing his neighbour to death citing incessant noise coming from the victim's flat, was sentenced to psychiatric care by a Blekinge court on Friday.

Man sentenced for killing 'noisy' neighbour

The district court ruled that the man be kept in care under special discharge conditions.

According to the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) legal advisory board, the man suffers from a serious psychiatric condition.

He has previously admitted to killing his 19-year-old neighbour in January in a frenzied knife attack, blaming his actions on the “creaking” noise coming from his flat.

The man has however indicated that he is unable to remember the entire sequence of events.

According to a statement released by prosecutor Pernilla Åström, the man said he felt bothered by the noise and armed himself with a large knife before ringing the bell on his neighbour’s door.

He proceeded to stab the 19-year-old repeatedly. The young man later died in the building’s stairwell from his injuries.

After the stabbing, the 39-year-old made his way to the Blekinge Institute of Technology, where he worked. He then sent an email to the local Sydöstran newspaper explaining what he had done and where he was.

He requested that someone from the newspaper alert the police.

But no one from the Sydöstran’s editorial offices read the email until after the 39-year-old had already been spotted by another employee at the university, who in turn called police.

The man, who had barricaded himself in a room at the university, was later arrested without incident and subsequently admitted to killing the 19-year-old.

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CRIME

Helsingborg ‘has become major European cocaine hub’

A port in southern Sweden has become a European hub for cocaine being smuggled from South America to the continent, Swedish customs warned Friday following several large drug seizures this year.

Helsingborg 'has become major European cocaine hub'

Swedish customs agents have seized 867 kilograms (1,911 pounds) of cocaine at the Helsingborg port since the beginning of this year, the customs agency said, compared with the 822 kilograms seized in the whole of Sweden last year.

Including seizures abroad destined for Helsingborg, a total of 1.3 tonnes of cocaine had been seized since September 2022.

Magnus Pettersson, a senior prosecutor with the Prosecution Authority’s unit for international and organised crime, told a press conference the seizures “were completely without precedent in Swedish criminal history.”

“Sweden, and the port of Helsingborg, has become the point of transit for South American cocaine on its way out onto the illegal European market,” Pettersson said.

The narcotics are being smuggled in containers often transporting fruits and vegetables on freight ships from South America, in many cases Ecuador, he said.

Hidden compartments are often built into the containers. Helsingborg had emerged as a hub for drug trafficking because the frequency of harbour controls had been too low and security around the port had been lacking.

Coupled together, this meant there was a “near free flow of cocaine” both into and out of the port.

In order to stop the smuggling, every refrigerated container from South America passing through the port would need to be controlled, the customs agency said. The smuggling was believed to involve both Swedish and international criminal networks.

In recent months, Swedish Customs had on multiple occasions discovered tracks from smugglers breaking into the port area to empty the containers.

Equipment such as “bags, bolt cutters and blow torches” had been found, the agency said in a statement.

While additional resources had been committed, the customs agency lamented that few arrests had been made, noting that the only arrest had been of two Albanian citizens after they had collected 47 kilograms of cocaine in December.

Sweden has struggled to rein in a surge of shootings and bombings in recent years, as gangs settle scores fuelled by the narcotics trade.

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