Inventor guilty of sub murder

Dressed entirely in black, a Danish inventor was sentenced to life in prison yesterday in a grisly case straight from the pages of a dark Scandinavian psycho-thriller.

Peter Madsen sat motionless at the Copenhagen City Court as he was found guilty of murdering, sexually mutilating and dismembering a Swedish female journalist with premeditation aboard his homemade submarine in Copenhagen harbour in 2017.

Already well known in Denmark for his submarines and his plan to send a human into space in a homemade rocket, Madsen was detained last August when he emerged from his submarine without Kim Wall, a 30-year-old who was researching a piece on him.

Later that month, police identified a torso washed ashore in Copenhagen as Wall’s. Her arms, legs and head were found later.

Madsen changed his version of events several times, finally arguing that Wall had been suffocated by an accidental gas leak.

But forensic tests found that she had either been strangled or had her throat cut — and that around the time of her death, Madsen had stabbed her in her breasts and genitals with a knife or screwdriver.

Madsen, 47, admitted to dismembering the body and throwing it off his 17m submarine, but denied murder.

Wall was a freelance journalist whose work had appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Time, the New York Times, the Atlantic Magazine, the Guardian, Foreign Policy and the South China Morning Post. — Reuters