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The woman was looking forward to lunch with her online date. But when she opened the front door, she was instead brutally assaulted and tied up. For several hours she was held prisoner in her home, and forced to hand over money.
Now a man has been sentenced.
The mother of small children in southern Stockholm was looking forward to the date. She had met a man through the dating app Badoo, and decided that he would come to her house for lunch. When she opened the front door, a man wearing a mask stood outside. He didn’t look like the man in the photos from the dating app.
“Once I met him, all I saw was the staring look and that there is something not right,” the woman later told the police.
Instead of a nice lunch, the man barged in, pushed her to the floor while she heard the steps of another person in the stairwell. The woman was tied behind and had a hood over her head.
The men claimed that they belonged to the Russian mafia, and that they were looking for money.
“I said please don’t do this to me, I’m a single mother,” she later told me.
Was held captive in the home for hours
The men strangled her, beat her and she was forced at knifepoint to tell her bank details so that more than SEK 10,000 could be taken from the account. In addition, they tried to take a loan in her name of at least SEK 100,000.
The men held the woman in their grip for just over three hours. Before they left, they taped her eyes shut with silver tape, and told her not to move until her ovulation cycle rang. The woman dared not do anything but obey.
The woman was assaulted at the end of February, but it would take a month or so before the police got a lead.
– DNA was secured from the silver tape which could be matched to a 30-year-old man. It turned out that he had previously had some kind of relationship with the woman, and also stayed at her house. But she could not point him out during the investigation, says prosecutor Tomas Malmenby.
– He had knowledge of her, had borrowed money from her before and was at this time in urgent need of more money. So the theory is that he set up a fake dating profile to get back in touch with her.
The woman was looking forward to lunch with her online date. But when she opened the front door, she was instead brutally assaulted and tied up. For several hours she was held captive in her home, and was forced to hand over money. Photo: Police Photo: Police “Being a little too gullible”
The 30-year-old man was charged with a series of crimes, but has always denied any wrongdoing. However, the district court follows the prosecution’s line and points to the DNA trace on the tape, and also that the man’s phone had been in the area at the time of the assault.
He is convicted of kidnapping, robbery, assault in a court case and extortion. The district court writes in the verdict that the woman “feared for her life and felt something that cannot be described in any other way than fear of death”.
The punishment is imprisonment for four years and eight months, and the man must also pay damages of almost SEK 34,000 to the woman.
The prosecutor wanted the man to be deported as well, but the district court rejects the request and refers to the fact that the man has a permanent residence permit, has been in the country for a long time and that he also has family here.
It is unclear who the man’s crony is, but the incident has left a deep mark on the woman. She told the police about dating, that “it’s like that thing, that when you’ve had dates and such, you’ve kind of been a little too gullible. It’s never been a problem, but I’ve never experienced anything like this. I have been in shock and really regret that I decided that, but what’s done is done”.