Rakhmat Akilov sentenced to life imprisonment for Stockholm terror attack

From the Swedish edition of The Local

Rakhmat Akilov, the Uzbek national who carried out the April 2017 Stockholm terror attack, has been sentenced to life in prison for “terrorist crimes”.

Stockholm District Court also found him guilty of 119 counts of attempted murder and 24 counts of endangering others. He will be deported from Sweden once his sentence is served and banned from returning. 

Akilov stole a truck and ran down pedestrians on the city’s busy Drottninggatan street on April 7th 2017, killing five and injuring ten more. Before doing so he swore allegiance to Isis, though the jihadist group never claimed responsibility for the attack.

prosecutor Hans Ihrman had urged Stockholm’s District Court to jail him for life. Ihrman argued that his client was “a danger to society and will be so in the future as long as he has the same beliefs that he has today”, and called for him to be expelled from Sweden after serving his sentence.

The District Court agreed with Ihrman, labeling the attack “perhaps the most serious crime ever carried out in Sweden”. There is “no doubt whatsoever that a life sentence is applicable” and “nor is there any doubt that he should be deported,” senior judge Ragnar Palmkvist said. Akilov’s “sympathies for Isis are not up for discussion, he has himself admitted that several times…”

Akilov expressed no remorse for this actions throughout the trial.

An average life term in Sweden is 16 years, while the longest term a person has served in the Nordic nation is 34 years.

The trial, which started in February was one of the biggest in Swedish history,