Another day, another gripping story of cultural enrichment from Sweden.

Many thanks to FouseSquawk for translating this report from Expressen:

Swiped at ex-wife with ax in revenge attack

Abdi Houssein hit his ex-wife in the head with an ax

July 6, 2018

Abdi Houssein, 51, lay in wait in a stairwell, armed with an ax.

When his ex-wife passed, he went on a senseless attack and hit her up to twenty times.

Now the court of appeal has reduced the sentence to sixteen years in prison, after the court had already sentenced him to eighteen years.

In early 2018, the Uppsala resident Abdi Houssein was arrested and charged, suspected of threatening his ex-wife’s life on several occasions. During the investigation, the woman said that she had been given away in marriage to Houssein when they both lived in Ethiopia, but that they had been separated in Sweden for five years.

In February, the case was closed when the 51-year-old was sentenced to fines for unlawful threats — and freed.

Then he was ordered to have no contact with his ex-wife, and a proceeding that would give her sole custody of the children was in progress. He also saw it as a threat that she could disappear into a sheltered accommodation.

Planned revenge while in detention

But in the meantime he had planned his revenge.

He was released on February 2. On February 5, he bought an ax at the Bauhaus. The day after — February 6 — he went to work.

Surveillance pictures show how Abdi Houssein is on the ground floor in a stairwell in the Gottsunda district of Uppsala, armed with a red ax. There he waits for half an hour before he sees his ex-wife — who is heading to pick up the children at the kindergarten — walking by.

The pictures show how he walks out of the stairwell, with the ax behind his back, and rushes towards the woman.

In front of several witnesses, he begins to chop wildly at the woman. When she falls to the ground injured, he continues to chop. According to testimony he hit her between ten and twenty times with the ax.

The witness: “You must stop!”

“I began to bark at him and told him to stop your damned… you must stop!” I said this three, four times to him. In the end he stopped and then he raised his ax against me and shouted “Come on, come on!” Then he backed off a few meters. The woman was lifeless in the snow, the witness, Daniel El Mallah, 63, had previously said.

After the attack, Abdi Houssein was still armed with the ax, which he eventually threw in a pile of leaves along the escape route.

The woman was severely injured in the attack, but survived.

“She suffered several very serious and life-threatening injuries. The most serious injuries are to her face and skull; unfortunately she has lost an eye,” the woman’s lawyer Henrik Jansson said earlier.

The court of appeal decreases the penalty

Abdi Houssein specifically acknowledged gross abuse, but denied that he tried to murder the woman. When the District Court announced its verdict in May, they followed the prosecutor’s request to sentence him to eighteen years in prison for attempted murder.

The judgment was appealed to the court of appeal — which now chooses to lower the sentence.

On Friday, Svea Hovrätt announced a new verdict, where Abdi Houssein is sentenced to sixteen years in prison for the assassination attempt.

The judgment states:

“The High Court further agrees with the District Court that it was only temporary circumstances and a highly qualified care effort that resulted in the crime’s not being completed, so the scope for a reduction of the penalty value is limited. However, taking this into account, the court of appeal considers that the penalty value is somewhat lower than that District Court found and corresponds to prison for sixteen years instead of eighteen.”

“We note that the court of appeal has listened to our arguments that the punishment in the district court was too long. My client says, however, that he never intended to kill the plaintiff and that the sentence should have been reduced further,” said Houssein’s Defense Attorney, Jöns Gerhardsson.