Trial begins over sniper attacks on immigrants

A SWEDISH man prosecutors say was interested in a jailed racist murderer known as “Laser Man” has gone on trial charged with carrying out a series of sometimes fatal copycat sniper attacks on immigrant victims.

In a case that has highlighted tensions with foreigners in a Nordic region already traumatised by Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik, Swedish prosecutors have charged Peter Mangs, 40, with three murders and 12 attempted murders.

“I am seeking a guilty sentence for murder,” chief prosecutor Solveig Wollstad told the court as she began to set out her case against him yesterday.

Mangs, who was arrested in late 2010 after a massive manhunt, has pleaded not guilty to all the serious charges, but guilty to two counts of causing property damage.

He is alleged to have shot at people in Malmo, mostly immigrants, over a 12-month period, killing one person. Prosecutors say he also killed two people in 2003. One victim was shot though a window while he was working out in a gym. Two men were shot as they sat in a parked car, and another was shot in the back while waiting for a bus.

Prosecutors painted an image of Mangs as a man obsessed with guns who was hostile to immigrants and had an interest in the “Laser Man”, a racist gunman who used a rifle equipped with laser sights to shoot at immigrants in the early 1990s.

Prosecutors showed the court two pistols they said were owned by Mangs, a laser sight, and a combat vest used for carrying knives, as well as ammunition found in his flat.

Roughly 40 per cent of Malmo’s population are first- or second-generation immigrants and one in three is unemployed, compared with a national jobless rate under 9 per cent.