On Monday, the trial against the 18-year-old who has been charged with the murder of father Mikael in a pedestrian tunnel in Skärholmen last year began.
He has not shot the plaintiff, said lawyer Harri Keränen when the defendants were to explain their stance on the suspicions.
Four more people are charged with gross protection of a criminal and aiding and abetting gross protection of a criminal. They are not detained and therefore entered the courtroom through the same door as the audience, where two of them covered their faces with their hoodies. All those involved deny any wrongdoing.
The 18-year-old man, who is in custody, is also charged with gross weapons offense, which he partially admits to but not when it comes to the time of Mikael's murder.
Denies crime
In questioning, the 18-year-old has claimed that he test-fired the weapon earlier in April, but denies being present at the murder.
When the murder occurred last spring, it led to great outrage among the public and residents in the area, as well as among national politicians who visited the pedestrian tunnel where the murder took place days after the incident.
The outrage in society was not noticeable in the courtroom in Sollentuna. However, it still lingers among Mikael's relatives, who are the plaintiffs and were present in the courtroom.
Tears in the courtroom
When the prosecutor played the nearly ten-minute-long emergency call where Mikael's son, crying, called the police and with a panicked voice told them that his father had been shot, several of them cried, and one of the women rocked back and forth with her upper body.
The relatives occasionally looked back at the defendants in the courtroom, probably to see if they reacted to the call and the boy's sorrow and panic.
But the defendants all sat still.
At one point, the presiding judge noted that one of the relatives was very upset. He said he had full understanding for it but also said that the proceedings would not be interrupted for that reason. Instead, the woman was advised to leave the courtroom if her emotions became unmanageable.
The background to the murder early on Monday evening, April 10, is, according to the indictment, that the man confronted three youths at a pedestrian tunnel in Skärholmen in southern Stockholm.
It is alleged that a verbal exchange took place between Mikael and the youths in the pedestrian tunnel, which ended with the fatal shooting.
The murder is described in the indictment as particularly ruthless, since the man was shot in front of his son, who was about 60 meters away.
The accused 18-year-old is said to have fled on a bicycle after the murder, on which his DNA was later found.
About two months after the shooting, what is believed to be the murder weapon was also found in a basement storage room in Skärholmen. On the pistol, DNA from two people, including the 18-year-old, was found.
The man, 17 years old at the time of the incident, is linked by the police to a criminal network called the Skärholmsfalangen.
He has long been active in criminal circles, and the police believe he was criminally active as early as 13 years old, as stated in a LVU decision from 2021.
Source: The preliminary investigation
