The Eritrean man who murdered a mother and her son in Ikea as “revenge” for the Swedish state having rejected his asylum application is claiming damages for “defamatory” posts about him on Facebook.
In August 2015, Abraham Ukbagabir grabbed a packet of kitchen knives in Ikea and tested them for sharpness before stabbing to death a 55-year-old woman and her 28-year-old son.
At the migration office in Sweden, just hours before launching the attack for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment, Ukbagabir heard that his application for asylum would be rejected.
“I regard it as a crime against me, when everybody else is allowed to stay in the country except me,” the killer said during the trial.
“To show that I was treated unfairly, and in order to feel at peace, I attacked.”
It emerged earlier this year that the 37-year-old migrant’s lawyer requested his client should be transferred to his native Eritrea after Ukbagabir received threats, and was reportedly beaten multiple times by other inmates.
But documents seen by Expressen reveal the African is now seeking compensation for comments posted on social media which he says have threatened his safety.
“He is supposed to be dead, not just injured”, an unnamed man wrote on Facebook last winter in a post relating to Ukbagabir, for which he has now been charged with libel.
In other posts, the anonymous 45-year-old “wrote disparagingly of the killer’s skin colour”, and had wondered how hard it could be to “break the neck” of the African migrant.
“The post was such that one could expect Ukbagabir be exposed to more violence, as a result,” said the prosecutor.
“And an aggravating factor that must be taken into account is how the motive for the crime was to violate the plaintiff’s race or colour.”
Dubbed the ‘Ikea murderer’ by the press, the Eritrean is demanding 5,000 Swedish krona (£450 GBP) from the accused as compensation for the Facebook posts.