Last year, the man was acquitted in the district court because the evidence was not considered strong enough.
The prosecution is based on DNA and witness statements from a key witness, and the district court considered that the witness statement should be treated with "extra caution" and therefore could not lead to a guilty verdict. But the Svea Court of Appeal thinks otherwise and places greater trust in the witness.
It was on November 21, 2018, that a 22-year-old man was shot dead with multiple shots in the Nyfors district of Eskilstuna. The murder took place in front of a large number of people, but no one named the shooter.
Despite several leads, the police could not link any perpetrator to the crime, and the fatal shooting became a so-called cold case.
The turning point came in 2023 when the police, thanks to new technology, got a DNA hit on a pair of gloves – and a crucial witness statement from the key witness – a 19-year-old convicted of murder who stepped forward in exchange for a seven-year sentence reduction.
"It is satisfying that the Court of Appeal shares my assessment of the main witness's credibility and that it has thus been possible to use the system with so-called key witnesses to obtain guilty verdicts in crimes where there is a strong culture of silence", says prosecutor Åsa Kullgren in a press release.
