[TheLocal.se] The trial of six Uzbek and Kyrgyz nationals accused of financing terrorism got under way in Stockholm on Monday, with three of them also charged with planning a terror attack."If the terrorist crime had been carried out, it could have seriously hurt Sweden," the prosecution said in its charge sheet.
The first day of the trial focused on the prosecution's claim that the six men sent funds to ISIS to finance its terrorism operations.
The prosecution argued that one of them men, 34-year-old Akromion Ergashev of Uzbekistan, sent almost 18,000 kronor ($2,000) to a middleman in
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, who in turn sent it to two ISIS supporters in Syria. The prosecution presented chats on encrypted mobile phone apps and account statements as evidence.
The other five suspects were identified in court documents as Uzbek nationals Bakhtior Umarov, 30, Gulom Tadjiyev, 39, Shoahmad Mahmudov, 24, and David Idrisson, 46, and 39-year-old Kyrgyz national Atabek Abdullayev.
Abdullayev, Idrisson and Umarov are also accused of planning a terror attack in Sweden. The prosecution believes they acquired large amounts of chemicals to make explosives, as well as gas masks, walkie-talkies and other military materials as part of their plot.
Photographs of crowded locations in Stockholm were found in some of the suspects' phones, suggesting they may have been possible targets, according to the prosecution.
During a police raid in Strömsund, 600 kilometres north of Stockholm, in late April, neighbours told the Dagens Nyheter newspaper they saw police removing about 15 large plastic chemical containers from a shed on an empty property.
One of the suspects is also believed to have been in contact with Rakhmat Akilov, a radicalized Uzbek asylum seeker who mowed down pedestrians in Stockholm with a stolen truck in April 2017, killing five people. Akilov was sentenced to life in prison in June 2018.
All six reject all of the charges against them.
The trial is taking place at a special high-security Stockholm courtroom, with the defendants sitting behind a bulletproof glass wall.
Man jailed in Malmö for raping nine-year-old girl[TheLocal.se] A man has been sentenced to six years in prison and deportation from Sweden for raping a nine-year-old girl in a shed outside an apartment building.
The 30-year-old approached the girl as she was cycling home from her school in Malmö, then lured her into the shed, locked the door, pushed her to the floor and raped her. He then held the girl by the throat, and threatened to beat her if she didn’t stop screaming, according to a report in the Aftonbladet newspaper,
The girl told police that she had never seen her attacker before, leaving police struggling to find a lead. But the man turned himself in five days later, confessing fully to what he had done.
According to the court's judgement, the man, who is himself father to a 9-year-old, told police that he had been in the area where the attack took place because he wanted “to find a girl to rape”. It didn't matter to him, he added, if the girl was a child.
“The crime should be considered aggravated with regard to the defendant’s low age and that NN [the perpetrator] used both violence and the threat of criminal action,” the court said.
The judge and three lay jurors disagreed over the sentence, however, with one arguing that the man's punishment should be reduced because he had contacted police himself.
The man was also found guilty of two sexual offences committed when he was living in Skellefteå, northern Sweden, earlier in the autumn: sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl; and exposing himself to and groping a third woman.
He was also found guilty of robbery, knife crime, and petty drugs offences.