For about a year, from the autumn of 2009, people in Malmö, Sweden's third-largest city, were being shot at by someone no one could see. Shots came through apartment windows, into parked cars, at a mosque, at a street-food stand and at people walking at night. In October 2010 the police said publicly that about fifteen shootings appeared to be the work of one gunman, that the same weapon had been used in several of them, and that the targets all seemed to be people of immigrant background. One person had died: Trez West Persson, a twenty-year-old Swedish woman shot in a car beside a friend.
On November 6, 2010, police arrested a thirty-eight-year-old Malmö man with no criminal record, a gun license and two registered weapons. Prosecutors later charged him with three murders, two of them in 2003, years before anyone had suspected a serial shooter. His name was Peter Mangs. Two courts convicted him of two murders and, in the end, eight attempted murders, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The Swedish press has named him in full since his arrest.
Few facts about Mangs's early life have been established in court or in the press. He was thirty-eight when he was arrested in November 2010 and forty when his trial opened in May 2012, which puts his birth around 1972. In 2015 he published a book about his own life, and The Local reported that it described an upbringing in Småland, in southern Sweden. His mother told police, according to Aftonbladet, that he had been born with a slightly enlarged head and had needed an operation, which doctors said would not cause complications. In court Mangs referred to it himself: "they drilled a hole into my brain when I was young."
Addressing the Malmö District Court in June 2012, after weeks of declining to answer questions, he gave a long account of his life from 1988 onward. He spoke about past relationships, about moving in 1996 to Florida, where his father lives, and about returning to Sweden three years later. He spoke about his interest in music, said he had worked with young girls who had mental health problems, and called himself "a sensitive and artistic person who is easily bored." News reports at the time of his trial described him as unemployed, a loner and a person with a history of psychiatric problems.
He had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. In court he said he had known since 2006 that he no longer had it, though he kept attending support groups. A psychologist who saw him in custody testified that she did not believe the diagnosis was correct. His mother was also skeptical of it.
His mother told police, as Aftonbladet reported, that the suspicions against him were "idiocy" and that it seemed "inconceivable that it is Peter who is responsible for this." She also said that he visited her at least every other week and spent the time on the computer while she did needlework, that he sometimes complained about the upkeep of his neighborhood and blamed "foreigners" for the mess, and that she would answer: "You're a bloody racist. Shut up." She found it hard to believe that he held a weapons license or belonged to a gun club. His interests, as she knew them, were crafts such as wood-carving.
According to the prosecution, Mangs obtained a weapons license and several guns about six months before the July 2003 killing of Firas Al-Shariah. He told the court his interest in guns grew out of an interest in technology: "I wanted to take weapons apart, experiment with rebuilding them and so on." He would not say how he had bought them. When the prosecutor asked why he had wanted them, he answered that there are "several ways to kill a person."
The prosecution also told the court that about a year before that shooting, Mangs had sought medical help, showing a growing interest in death and a fear that he "might hurt someone." Asked about this in court, he said, "That is probably correct," and connected it to his own reading in psychology and psychiatry. Asked directly whether he had sought help because he feared he might kill someone, he said, "it might have been." The Local reported that psychiatric services that saw him in 2003 described him as "easily insulted."
Kooros Effatian was sixty-six years old and had come to Sweden from Iran. He lived in an apartment on Kantatgatan in Lindängen, a district in the south of Malmö. On June 14, 2003, he was found dead in his apartment. He had probably died the day before, and the court later fixed the date of his killing as June 13. He had been shot in the chest. His body was found on his sofa, covered with cushions, blankets and clothing, and he had been robbed. Police at the time found nothing to connect his death to any other case.
Seven years passed before investigators concluded that Effatian had been the first known victim of the man they had arrested in 2010. Of the three murders with which Mangs was charged, Effatian's was one of the two on which he was convicted.
Six weeks later and on the same street in Lindängen, a second man was killed. Firas Al-Shariah was twenty-three, and the Iran Times described him as Iraqi. On the morning of Monday, July 28, 2003, between six and seven o'clock, he was shot in the head in the stairwell of his building at Gånglåtsvägen 35 as he was leaving for work. Shortly after seven a caller reported an injured man in the stairwell. He was taken to the university hospital in Lund and died there. His wallet, with a large amount of money in it, was left with him. Police found no evidence linking his death to Effatian's.
A bullet was recovered from a door near his home. After Mangs's arrest, forensic examiners found it compatible with weapons from Mangs's apartment. An acquaintance testified that Mangs had told him he had shot "a young man and an older man on Gånglåtsvägen." Mangs's defense lawyer, Douglas Norking, told the court that Mangs had never been at the scene and did not know the victim. Both courts acquitted Mangs of this murder. The Court of Appeal said the technical evidence about the bullet and cartridges was weaker than in the other cases. In May 2019 the Swedish Police listed the killing of Firas Al-Shariah among the cold cases in its southern region and asked the public for information.
Trez West Persson was twenty years old. Shortly after midnight on October 10, 2009, she was sitting in a parked car on Västra Skrävlinge kyrkoväg in Malmö, near a church, with a twenty-two-year-old acquaintance, Xhafer Dani. The prosecution described Dani as an immigrant man with a criminal record. According to prosecutor Solveig Wollstad, Mangs most likely came upon the two of them by chance. A man walked up to the car and fired. "He just came at us," Dani told police. The car would not start. Dani was hit several times, some of the wounds to the head. He got out, ran, alerted friends and lost consciousness. It was more than a month before he could remember enough to describe the night to police. At trial he said little. "My memory has taken a turn for the worse," he told the court. His counsel, Magnus Hermansson, said Dani had suffered life-threatening injuries and would never fully recover.
Trez West Persson was kept alive in the hospital for a time and died the next day. Her mother, Jeanette Persson West, told the court that the family faced immense loss and sorrow. "Our family is broken for ever," she said. When the district court found Mangs guilty in July 2012, she told TT that the verdict was a relief but that the punishment mattered less to her. "I'll never get Trez back, no matter what. Never ever."
The prosecution's account of how he did it was that Mangs "shoots and empties the whole magazine" into the car, firing from two directions. In August 2013, after the verdict was final, Mangs told the newspaper Sydsvenskan that he had fired eleven shots, that "It was me and only me who shot at Trez," and that Dani, not West Persson, had been his target. He said Dani did not look "like a criminal" but that the circumstances pointed that way, which was enough. A psychologist who saw Mangs in custody testified in 2012 that he had told her the shooting came after his Russian girlfriend failed to come to Sweden as planned. He had spent a lot of money on a driver's license so that he could pick her up at Svågertorp, she said.
After West Persson's death, the shootings that the courts later attributed to Mangs came close together. The district court's guilty verdict in July 2012 listed, besides the two murders and the attempt on Dani:
October 23, 2009: shots into an apartment on Hyacintgatan, judged as aggravated unlawful threats.
December 31, 2009: shots at the mosque on Jägersrovägen, where several people were present, judged as attempted murder, and shots the same night into an apartment on Hyacintgatan, judged as aggravated unlawful threats.
March 12, 2010: shots into an apartment on Hårds väg, aggravated unlawful threats.
March 16, 2010: two men shot while sitting in a parked car on Professorsgatan, attempted murder.
Summer 2010: three men shot at on Regementsgatan, outside the Aq-va-kul swimming hall. The district court found that the shots were not meant to kill and judged them attempted aggravated assault. The Court of Appeal later judged them as attempted murder of all three men.
August 24, 2010: a man shot at a street kitchen on Köpenhamnsvägen, attempted murder.
The prosecution also alleged that about five months after the October 2009 shooting, Mangs fired at a man in a Malmö apartment, apparently mistaking him for Dani, and that cartridges of the same type linked the two. It said Mangs had followed Dani's movements and kept a document on him and his relatives on his computer. The psychologist who saw him in custody testified that shots fired at the police station on Davidshalls torg might have been his reaction to feeling that no one was responding to the shootings.
Not every shooting charged ended in a conviction. The district court found the evidence insufficient on seven of the twenty counts, including the Al-Shariah murder, and the Court of Appeal acquitted him of five attempted murders from 2010.
One count concerned a man who was never hurt. Prosecutors said Mangs had tried several times to kill a fifty-four-year-old man in Lindängen who had convictions for murder and rape. Mangs, they said, had collected information about criminals from court records and mapped them online. He admitted in court that he had gone to the man's address at least five times carrying a loaded weapon and wearing a tactical vest. Each time the man was in custody. The prosecution said the motive was that in 2003 the man had tried to lure two young girls into a car, a crime for which he was convicted, and that one of the girls was the daughter of a friend of Mangs. The man, testifying by phone, said he was lucky not to have been at home, because he also kept weapons in his apartment. This was the conspiracy-to-murder charge, and Mangs was acquitted of it.
The Malmö police began to suspect in the autumn of 2010 that a single gunman was behind some of the shootings, at a time when the city was also seeing open-street shootings tied to gangs. Investigators compared the case to that of John Ausonius, the "Laser Man," who shot eleven people of immigrant origin in Stockholm between August 1991 and January 1992, killing one, and who was sentenced to life in 1994. At its peak seventy detectives worked the case, and the police received about 1,200 tips. Sveriges Radio later reported that the inquiry, at around $7 million, was the most expensive the police in Skåne had ever run.
One of those tips led to Mangs. It came anonymously and took two weeks to trace. Police found it had been sent from a computer belonging to the city of Malmö, used by a friend of Mangs who lived in municipal housing and who told them what he had heard Mangs say about the killings. Börje Sjöholm, who led the police operation, told Sydsvenskan that the tip said Mangs had hidden the weapon outdoors, so they watched his apartment instead of searching it. "If we'd gone into the apartment and not found a weapon we would have been screwed," he said. According to Sydsvenskan, as reported by The Local, a man was shot about two hours after the watch began, and the bullets were later traced to Mangs's weapon.
Mangs was arrested on Saturday, November 6, 2010. He denied the allegations. Police said he had no criminal record and held a license for two weapons, which were seized from his apartment. They also found a gun with a silencer, a bulletproof vest, a wig, masks and notes about shooting locations. On November 9 the Malmö District Court ordered him held on suspicion of one murder and five attempted murders.
The suspicions grew. On December 20, 2010, Wollstad announced that Mangs was also suspected of the two 2003 killings in Lindängen and of five attempted murders going back to 2006. A preliminary psychiatric examination that December suggested he might have a serious mental disorder and recommended a full forensic examination. By February 2011 he was suspected of three murders and fourteen attempted murders, and by August 2011, after two counts were added for shootings on the night of June 26, 2010, of nineteen serious crimes. Wollstad said that Mangs had talked in his early interviews and then stopped answering questions.
Prosecutors filed charges on May 7, 2012. The charge sheet ran to about sixty pages and listed twenty counts: three murders, twelve attempted murders, one conspiracy to murder, two aggravated assaults, aggravated obstruction of justice and two counts of criminal damage. Wollstad said the motive showed "a certain level of xenophobia, but also other things," including aggression toward people previously convicted of crimes.
The trial opened in Malmö District Court on May 14, 2012, under heavy security, with Mangs behind bulletproof glass and about thirty journalists from eight countries present. It overlapped with the trial in Norway of Anders Behring Breivik, who had praised Mangs during the first week of his own trial. Mangs denied every count except two of criminal damage, for shooting at street signs, which he said was practice in aiming under pressure. He refused to pay the city's 2,150-kronor repair bill; the signs, he said, "can become tourist attractions." Asked whether he had shot West Persson, he said "No." His most common answer, according to Sveriges Radio, was "no comment." Asked about the shootings in general, he said his whole decade of the 2000s was a muddle.
His defense, led by Douglas Norking and Jesper Montan, argued that no DNA or fingerprints placed him at any scene and challenged the forensic comparisons that tied bullets and cartridge cases to his gun. "Mangs is not a racist," Norking told the court. "He doesn't have anything against other cultures." In closing he said that "it's not been proven that Mangs at any time was at the scenes of the crimes or let off any gunshots," and that "the serial shooter who is being sought maybe never existed."
The prosecution's case rested on ballistics, on items found in his home and on witnesses who said Mangs had told them what he had done. The acquaintance he had met at an Asperger's meeting in Lund in 2005 testified that Mangs had asked him if he wanted to "come along and shoot people," and that Mangs had said of the Gånglåtsvägen shooting, "it was me who shot the ape." Asked why Mangs used that word, he said, "It's because he doesn't like some immigrants so much." Prison staff reported that Mangs had admitted the shootings several times; according to Aftonbladet he told a prison psychiatrist, "It was so easy that I did it again." The psychologist who saw him in custody testified that he had described several of the attacks to her and that they had grown out of insults and disappointment, a sense that society had not given him what he needed. "It's not the same Peter who sits calmly talking to me as the one who is out shooting," she said. Norking said she seemed "to blend in her own conclusions with her information from Peter."
In her closing argument on July 16, 2012, Wollstad asked for a sentence "at the level of a life sentence." She said Mangs "has ruthlessly ruined many people's lives" and "is completely indifferent" to their suffering, and that "it cannot be a coincidence that all of the victims, except two, were of immigrant origin." She told the court that Mangs called people of immigrant origin "monkeys."
On July 24, 2012, the court announced that it had found convincing evidence on thirteen of the twenty counts: the murders of Kooros Effatian and Trez West Persson; four attempted murders (Dani, the mosque, Professorsgatan and the street kitchen); three counts of aggravated unlawful threats; criminal damage, obstruction of justice and attempted aggravated assault for the Aq-va-kul shooting. It did not convict him of the murder of Firas Al-Shariah, five other attempted murders or the conspiracy count. The decision was not unanimous: one lay judge would have convicted him of only one murder.
Sentencing waited for a full forensic psychiatric examination, which would decide whether he went to prison or to psychiatric care. Mangs was observed around the clock for several weeks. The report, made public on September 26, 2012, concluded that he "didn't commit these actions under the influence of a serious psychiatric disorder" and that there was "no reason to hand Peter Mangs over to psychiatric care."
Sentencing was delayed again when the defense asked for a retrial, arguing that one of the lay judges had sat on the Malmö police board and attended its meetings three times in the autumn of 2010, while the investigation was underway. Senior judge Lennart Strinäs found that board members had received no information about the investigation and rejected the request on October 25, 2012.
On November 23, 2012, the court sentenced Mangs to life imprisonment and ordered him to pay his victims about 1,175,000 kronor in damages. Strinäs said there was no possibility of a shorter sentence. The court cited "extreme ruthlessness, and a lack of empathy." The reports of that day give the convictions as two murders and five attempted murders, with the remaining counts as unlawful threats and lesser offenses. "We've known for a long time that Mangs would get a tough penalty," Montan told TT.
Both sides appealed to the Skåne and Blekinge Court of Appeal (Hovrätten över Skåne och Blekinge) in Malmö. Mangs asked to be acquitted of everything. The prosecution asked for convictions on three murders and thirteen attempted murders and in March 2013 called a new witness about a shooting in which two men were hit in the legs.
The Court of Appeal ruled on April 25, 2013. It upheld the life sentence and agreed with the district court on nearly all questions of guilt. The one change was the Aq-va-kul shooting. The appeal court found that the shots had been fired from too far away to be aimed only at injuring, and convicted Mangs of attempted murder of all three men, which raised the total to two murders and eight attempted murders. It acquitted him again of the murder of Firas Al-Shariah and of five attempted murders from 2010. Judge Lars Göran Abelson said the convictions were well above the threshold for a life sentence.
The defense asked the Supreme Court to hear the case, arguing that the weapons analysis linking Mangs's gun and bullets to the crime scenes should be repeated by technicians who had not worked on the case. On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court refused leave to appeal, and the sentence became final. The counts that stand are the murders of Kooros Effatian and Trez West Persson, eight attempted murders, aggravated unlawful threats, criminal damage and obstruction of justice.
In August 2013, in an interview with Sydsvenskan at Kumla prison, Mangs admitted the killing of Trez West Persson, which he had denied for two and a half years. He called himself a "punishing avenger on the hunt," said he had seen a chance to kill undetected in Ögårdsparken, where the shooting took place, and said, "I did wrong for the right reasons," and "I regret all human suffering." Asked how he had lived with it, he said, "It was too hard to handle on my own." The next day he told the paper that the aim of the shootings had been to incite gang warfare and raise tension in the city, and that he had practiced shooting across Malmö "at least a hundred times." The Local reported that his remarks came close to admitting two further killings, without an explicit confession.
Wollstad said the confession might matter to the families but that reopening a case would need more than his word. "There needs to be more than his confession of what he has done," she said. Former chief prosecutor Sven Erik Alhem said it had little procedural significance. The psychiatrist Ulf Åsgård suggested Mangs might want attention again and not to be forgotten, and compared him to Ausonius, who began confessing to crimes he had denied after some years in prison.
In May 2015 Mangs published a book about his life himself. In it, as reported by Skånska Dagbladet, TT and The Local, he wrote that he had once seen an illegally parked red Ferrari in Malmö that he believed belonged to the footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović, had gone home to get his pistol, and found the car gone when he returned. He wrote that he "thought there would be a proper hullabaloo in the media" had it happened. The Local reported that the book described hostility toward Jews and people of immigrant background, and that he wrote of almost wanting to be arrested because he could not accept a life dominated by "multiculturalism" and "mass consumption." None of these claims was tested in court.
Mangs is serving a life sentence. As of the August 12, 2013 SVT report he was held at Kumla prison, and as of the May 8, 2015 reports on his book he was still serving life. Where he has been held since then, and whether he has asked to have the life term converted into a fixed term, are not known. Under Swedish law, as The Local explained in 2012, a person sentenced to life may ask a court to convert the sentence into a fixed term after ten years.
The murder of Firas Al-Shariah remains legally unsolved. Mangs was acquitted of it twice, and in 2019 the police were still asking the public for information about it.
The murder of Firas Al-Shariah: charged, with an acquaintance's testimony and a bullet compatible with Mangs's weapons, but rejected by both courts. Mangs is not a convicted killer in this case.
Further confessions: The Local reported in August 2013 that Mangs's remarks came close to admitting two more killings. No such confession was published, and no case was reopened.
Motive: prosecutors spoke of xenophobia mixed with aggression toward people with criminal records; his lawyer said he was not racist; the custody psychologist pointed to insults and disappointment; Mangs himself spoke of punishing criminals and of starting gang conflict. The courts convicted him of the shootings without resolving a single motive.
Asperger's syndrome: diagnosed by a doctor, doubted by the custody psychologist and by his mother; Mangs said he no longer had it from 2006. The forensic examination found no serious mental disorder.
The Ibrahimović story: Mangs's own claim in a self-published book, never tested in court or by any reported police inquiry.
One 2012 report, by the Czech site Romea, said Mangs set fire to the car in which Trez West Persson died. No Swedish source says this; the court record and the prosecution describe shooting.
About 1972: Peter Mangs born (age 38 at his arrest in November 2010).
1996 to 1999: lives in Florida, where his father lives, then returns to Sweden.
About 2002: seeks medical help, saying he fears he might hurt someone (prosecution account).
Early 2003: obtains a weapons license and guns, about six months before the Al-Shariah shooting (prosecution account).
June 13, 2003: Kooros Effatian, 66, shot dead in his apartment on Kantatgatan, Lindängen; found the next day.
July 28, 2003: Firas Al-Shariah, 23, shot in his stairwell on Gånglåtsvägen; dies in Lund. Mangs later acquitted.
October 10, 2009: Trez West Persson, 20, and Xhafer Dani, 22, shot in a car on Västra Skrävlinge kyrkoväg; West Persson dies the next day.
October 23, 2009 to August 24, 2010: shootings at apartments on Hyacintgatan and Hårds väg, the Jägersrovägen mosque, a car on Professorsgatan, three men near Aq-va-kul and a street kitchen on Köpenhamnsvägen.
October 2010: police say about fifteen shootings appear linked to one gunman.
November 6, 2010: Mangs arrested; remanded November 9.
December 20, 2010: named as a suspect in the two 2003 killings.
May 7, 2012: charged with twenty counts.
May 14, 2012: trial opens in Malmö District Court.
July 24, 2012: guilty of 13 of 20 counts, including two murders.
September 26, 2012: forensic psychiatric report finds no serious mental disorder.
October 25, 2012: retrial request over a lay judge rejected.
November 23, 2012: sentenced to life imprisonment.
April 25, 2013: Court of Appeal upholds life; two murders and eight attempted murders.
June 25, 2013: Supreme Court refuses leave to appeal; sentence final.
August 12, 2013: admits the West Persson killing to Sydsvenskan from Kumla prison.
May 8, 2015: reports on his self-published book; still serving life as of these reports.
May 2019: police list the Al-Shariah killing as a cold case.