Published: Just now
She was only 29 years old when she was stabbed to death in her own stairwell.
The murder appeared to remain unsolved until microscopic fragments of metal in her ribs became the crucial piece of the puzzle.
Now the woman’s husband is charged with the murder – after a four-year investigation in which each new lead first led to a dead end.
– It has been a difficult year, partly due to great sadness and partly not knowing what happened, says the woman’s family.
There is blood everywhere. On the walls and floor of the staircase. A bloody handprint can be seen on an apartment door.
The neighbor who finds the woman in the apartment building in Gävle on February 6, 2019 is shocked when he calls 112.
– It looks brutal, he says and tries to help the woman in shock.
The 29-year-old woman was stabbed in the chest, back and arms. When paramedics arrive at the scene, they start CPR, but her injuries are too serious.
A mother of three has been murdered on her way out into the street on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon.
When a woman is murdered, the statistics show how it is usually a man close to her who is the perpetrator.
In an apartment, three floors up from the murder scene, sits the woman’s husband, who is nine years older.
When the police knock on the man’s door, they find him strangely calm. He asks no questions at all about his wife, which according to the police on the spot is unusual.
He is arrested and the children are taken into custody.
No one knows then that it will take over four years, a laboratory in the Netherlands and a search for an unusual, red knife before charges can be brought.
The 29-year-old woman came to Sweden from Iraq in 2016 together with her husband, who is now indicted.
Already in the home country, according to what the woman herself said, the husband has been controlling and violent. He has not allowed her to have contact with many. She tells her mother when she arrives in Sweden that her husband sometimes tied her up when he left the house.
The controlling and jealous behavior also continues in Sweden, according to people close to them.
– We have also been able to find conversations in the woman’s mobile which may indicate that she had made contact with another man. There are circumstances that indicate that the husband may have seen this conversation on the day of the murder and that he then turned on her out of jealousy, says chamber prosecutor Arek Nowak about the motive.
When the couple and their three young children move to Gävle, the woman begins studying at SFI, Swedish for immigrants. School records submitted by the woman and which can be found in the preliminary investigation show how her Swedish is getting better and better.
In a school assignment, she writes about her husband.
“He is in my life, for better or for worse. I cannot describe him with a few lines, because he is my whole life”.
Photo: The police
The injuries on the 29-year-old woman’s body quickly make the police suspect that a knife is the murder weapon. On the same day that the husband is arrested, a large number of knives are therefore seized from the couple’s apartment.
However, some knives are rejected as evidence. They are considered too large to correspond to the entrance holes found on the woman’s body.
One of them, a bright red knife, which in pictures from the woman’s mobile phone can be seen lying on a cake plate when one of the daughters’ birthday is celebrated, is therefore left in one of the kitchen drawers.
And there it will continue to lie for months to come.
Conducting a murder investigation is like putting together a puzzle. In a courtroom, it must be established beyond all reasonable doubt that the accused is the perpetrator.
The accusation must therefore be well substantiated.
The clearance rate for murders in a close relationship is very high. Most often, the crime has taken place in the home, there is often a lot of technical evidence and a documented history of control or violence. Sometimes even an acknowledgment.
But in the murder investigation surrounding the 29-year-old woman’s death, police and prosecutors quickly run into problems.
The husband denies, his story is that his wife leaves home to go to Komvux where she will study Swedish at a higher level. He remains in the apartment with the youngest daughter, who is ill.
All the seized knives are carefully examined, but all are clean.
Despite the fact that the murder took place in a stairwell, there are no eyewitnesses to the crime.
But during the autopsy, the coroner finds damage to one of the woman’s ribs. Could residue from the murder weapon have stuck there?
– Early in the investigation, we therefore secured the rib from the woman. Partly so that it could be investigated later, and partly so that the woman could be buried. But it was not investigated for a long time because NFC, the national forensic center, did not have the opportunity to do the exact examinations of the rib that we needed, says Arek Nowak.
In March 2019, the husband is set free. The district court does not consider it justifiable to keep him detained any longer when no new evidence is presented.
Several investigative measures are still ongoing but that crucial piece of the puzzle is missing, and finding any institute in the world that can help examine the rib is difficult.
– Finally we receive information that it can be carried out at a national center in the Netherlands. In the fall of 2019, we send the rib down and we learn that there are actually microscopic traces of metal in the bone. We had a number of possible murder weapons in our possession and we sent down the knives, says the prosecutor.
However, every time the investigation seems to make a breakthrough, the investigators are faced with even more questions. None of the knives they sent down match the metal tracks.
– They could see that the metal tracks had a red color. Then we came to think of the red knife, which was initially dismissed, says Arek Nowak.
A new house search is carried out at the husband’s house. And in the same box as when the police left the apartment many months ago, the knife remains.
The answer from the Netherlands after the survey is what in Sweden corresponds to a final grade of +3, that is, the results strongly suggest that a knife like this is the murder weapon compared to other red knives.
And it is a grade +4, that the result speaks extremely strongly that it is a knife like this that has been used compared to all other knives in the world, regardless of color.
But it is just that, “a knife like this”.
– They couldn’t establish that it couldn’t be another exactly the same knife, says Nowak.
It’s back to the desk for new ideas.
At the same time, in Gävle, the woman’s relatives are sitting.
Years pass, they still don’t know what happened to their daughter, sister and mother.
– It has been difficult years partly because of great sadness and partly because of not knowing what led up to the death, they say through their plaintiff’s assistant Carina Abrahamsson.
The now released husband gets a girlfriend. The three children are taken into custody, partly because of the murder suspicions against the father and partly because, while the mother was alive, they are suspected of having both witnessed and themselves been subjected to violence by the father.
In a personal investigation carried out by the man, he tells how he tried to get the prosecutor to drop the investigation so he can move on with his life.
It also states: “He maintains that the couple were married for love and that they had no particular problems that would be the basis for such an incident. He (…) expresses that he partly lost his wife but also that a part of himself has disappeared.”
It is December 15, 2022, and on the television program Efterlyst, the police issue an unusual wanted notice.
It is a picture of the red knife and anyone with a similar one is asked to send it in to the police.
The investigators have then, after a long period of work, succeeded in finding the manufacturer of the knife they believe to be the murder weapon. They have found out how many were sold in Sweden and in which production rounds it was made.
But they need more knives to compare with.
The public sends in several pieces after the TV appeal and they are then flown on to the lab in the Netherlands.
– We get the answer that those knives have the weakest degree of matching with the metal traces from the ribs. The color of the knife is changed by, among other things, how much it has been used, how it has been washed and how exposed it has been to the sun, and the others do not match the traces that exist, says Arek Nowak.
Suddenly, the metal scraps are crucial. By examining similar knives to what they believe to be the murder weapon, they have been able to see how only the murder weapon matches the exact color shade found in the marks from the ribs.
The husband is arrested again and this time the investigation leads to prosecution.
Arek Nowak says that the evidence in the roughly 4,000-page preliminary investigation consists of more than just the knife.
– But if we hadn’t received help to find those metal remains, I don’t know if we would have reached an indictment, he says.
The trial against the husband, now 42 years old, begins on March 21 in Gävle district court.
The prosecutor will seek prison terms for the man, but for how many years he has not yet decided.
For the 29-year-old woman’s family, this is at least the beginning of a path towards some kind of justice.
“We (the woman’s mother and two brothers eds. note) are extremely grateful for the extensive and thorough work that the police and prosecutors have put in during the four years that have passed since the death. It has been a difficult year partly due to great sadness and partly due to not knowing what led up to the death. We welcome the indictment and the upcoming trial.”