Ethiopian Robbed Swedes and Was Not Deported - Now Charged With Murder
A 27-year-old Ethiopian served five years for robbing Swedes at knifepoint but was never deported. Now he is charged with murdering a 31-year-old Swedish man in Kiruna with 16 stab wounds.
KIRUNA - A 27-year-old Ethiopian national who was jailed for robbing Swedes, and for stabbing one of his victims, served his sentence and walked free. He was never deported.
Now he is charged again - this time with murdering a 31-year-old Swedish man with 16 knife wounds in a residential area in Kiruna in August.
This time the prosecutor is doing what a colleague failed to do after the robberies: demanding that he be deported to his home country.
The killing took place on 14 August among the apartment blocks on Ă…karegatan in Kiruna, in Sweden's far north. The 31-year-old died at the scene, and several people witnessed the attack in the courtyard. At least nine of the stab wounds were reportedly caught on video by a bystander.
According to the investigation, the killing grew out of a quarrel in a drug and alcohol setting. It started inside an apartment and continued out in the courtyard after the Swedish man left and the suspect ran after him.
"Play fighting" that got out of hand
Senior prosecutor Kristin Andersson describes it as an argument that escalated. Another person who tried to break up the fight was also injured.
The suspect is 27-year-old Guled Ahmed Bekele, born in Kebri Dahar in Ethiopia. His defence claims it was "play fighting" and "messing around" that went wrong with alcohol involved.
According to the court documents, he is suspected of stabbing the victim in the head, neck, upper arms and chest with a double-edged knife. The police preliminary investigation states that he stamped on the man's head and then kept stabbing him.
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Robbed Swedes at knifepoint
The Ethiopian national has been convicted of a long list of crimes since arriving in Sweden. About six years ago he was convicted of aggravated robbery and several other robberies in Sölvesborg in southern Sweden, where he lived before moving to Kiruna.
Most of the victims were Swedes whom he and another immigrant came across on the street.
At the 2020 trial he was also charged with attempted murder after being identified as the man who stabbed a robbery victim. The court acquitted him on that count because the injuries were not judged serious enough, and sentenced him to five years in prison.
Deportation never on the table
Deportation was never considered, because prosecutor Joel Holmgren of the Karlskrona prosecution office did not ask for it. So once his sentence was served, he was back on Swedish streets.
The prosecutor in Kiruna is now asking the court to deport Bekele to Ethiopia, with a ban on returning to Sweden, if he is convicted of the murder.
He admits parts of the sequence of events in which the Swedish man lost his life, but denies any crime. He insists they were only "play wrestling".
Simon Kristoffersson · Responsible Publisher & Senior Editor (Ansvarig utgivare)
Simon Kristoffersson is the Legally Responsible Publisher (Ansvarig utgivare) and Senior Investigative Editor of Samnytt and Samnytt News under Sweden's Constitutional Freedom of the Press Act, specializing in courts, organized crime, municipal governance, and public-sector investigations.
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