Girlfriend-strangler given 16 years in prison

A 52-year-old man from Ystad in southern Sweden, convicted of murdering his 25-year-old girlfriend, was sentenced on Friday to 16 years in prison.

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The man claimed in court that it “must have been someone else” who took his girlfriend’s life, as he was rendered unconcious shortly before the incident occurred.

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However, the Ystad District Court believed that the man had deliberately strangled his girlfriend.

The man’s teenage daughter, who was in the apartment with her own one-year-old child at the time of the murder, had explained earlier that her father had tried to strangle his partner on another occasion.

The daughter also made a number of emergency text messages to her mother and her brother immediately before the murder, stating that her father was abusing his girlfriend.

The murder may have been triggered by the fact that the woman had planned to leave the man and move elsewhere.

http://www.thelocal.se/40252/20120413/