The man convicted of murder from Sri Lanka has requested the reopening of the case, which has long been one of the biggest murder mysteries in Norwegian history. The petition was submitted on April 28 this year. In 2019, he was first sentenced to 11 years in prison for the murder of the 59-year-old Sjøvegan woman. Later that year, the Court of Appeal increased the sentence to 17 years. It believed it could be proven that the accused had lied at the age when he came to Norway, and was over the age of majority when the acts were performed. Now the man wants the case resumed. In this connection, he demands that his two passports be handed over, which were seized in 2018. The convicted person wants to have the authenticity of the passports verified by the Sri Lankan embassy. The ruling The prosecution, for its part, believes that the seizure should be maintained. It is justified that the passports are to be regarded as evidence if the case is reopened. Now Nord-Troms and Senja District Court have also ruled that the seizure must be maintained. The court points out that the readmission commission has requested that the case documents be sent. They assume that the commission will then make the necessary investigations of the case in that connection. The man’s defender, Christian Nergaard, tells news that his client wants to appeal the ruling. – Beyond that, I do not want to comment on the case, he says. news has not succeeded in getting police lawyer Stine Melbye Sørensen to speak. DNA traces paid off Marie Louise Bendiktsen was found raped and killed in her burnt-down house, on a July day at Sjøvegan in 1998. The murder led to, among other things, around 2,000 men being DNA tested through hair samples. The Sri Lankan was also in the police spotlight early in the investigation. But the DNA material from the crime scene was so deficient that the technology of the time was unable to do anything but exclude people from the case. 20 years after the murder, a former asylum seeker on Sjøvegan was arrested. Then there had been a new review of DNA traces from the crime scene, and it gave a complete hit on the man from Sri Lanka. The accused man has always denied that he killed Bendiktsen. This despite the fact that investigators found semen from him in the killed woman. The Sri Lankan claimed in court that he had had an affair with the woman, who was about 40 years older, and believes this explains the semen finding. In 2020, he appealed the ruling from the Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
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Convicted of the Sjøvegan murder will reopen the case – will not get their passports – news Troms and Finnmark
