A 41-year-old Afghan migrant has been charged by Swedish prosecutors in connection with the alleged murder of his teenage wife in Stockholm in 2016 after being on the run for two years.
The 41-year-old was arrested in the spring of 2018 in Iran after having first left Stockholm and then left Sweden entirely following the murder, and was on the run for two years, Swedish broadcaster SVT reports.
The victim had come to Sweden as an asylum seeker during the height of the migrant crisis in the latter half of 2015 and stated at the time she was 16 years old, although prosecutors alleged she may have been either 18 or 19.
She was then transferred to live in an HVB home, a home for vulnerable young people, but went missing in late March of the following year. Her body was discovered in the Hökarängen area of southern Stockholm two months later with police initially believing she may have been a victim of honour violence.
After discovering that her husband had been living in Sweden as an asylum seeker in Småland, police were able to track the phone calls between the two and found that both had been in the same area on the date of the murder. He later fled the country and was only discovered in Iran two years later and brought back to Sweden.
Prosecutor Tomas Malmenby said of the case: “She wanted to free herself and her husband couldn’t accept it,” while the lawyer for the 41-year-old claimed that while he had met with the woman, the last time he had seen her, she had been alive.
The pair were said to have been married in Afghanistan while the victim was still a child; marriages of minors have become a major topic in both Sweden, Germany and more recently in the U.S.A. due to mass migration.
The Swedish government addressed the issue last year by passing legislation that sees the country now refusing to recognise the marriages of underage persons even if the marriage was legal in the country in which they originate, despite some opposition from the country’s governing parties at the time.