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Updated: Less than 2 hours ago
In the wedding photo, Somayyeh and Erik Wanhatalo smile happily and squint in the summer sun.
Five years later, the new mother Somayyeh is found dead at the bottom of the Saltviken – rolled up in a rug.
Today, 45-year-old Erik Wanhatalo was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder.
– I understand that I took her life. She wanted to live, Wanhatalo has previously said in questioning.
In September last year, 40-year-old Somayyeh, or Sasha as she was called by her family, was found at the bottom of Saltviken in Stockholm, wrapped in a Persian rug she had once been given by her father.
She had then been missing for seven months.
The autopsy showed that Somayyeh had been strangled to death and her husband, 45-year-old Erik Wanhatalo, has admitted that he caused her death and then hid her body in the sea. However, he has denied responsibility for murder.
The Solna district court has already found him guilty – today they announced how long his prison sentence will be: it will be life imprisonment for murder.
He is also convicted of serious breach of child protection as the couple’s little son, whom they fought for many years to become parents, was at home when Somayyeh was killed and the district court believes that the course of death was long and that Somayyeh fought back before she became unconscious.
“It is out of the question that the child did not hear and thus perceive the commotion that took place when Erik Wanhatalo began strangling Somayyeh,” they write in the judgment.
Erik Wanhatalo also took the son with him in the car when he then dumped Somayyeh’s body before reporting her as missing.
Reported three times
Somayyeh and her husband had been a couple for many years. The relationship was marred by arguments and discord and, like many murders in a close relationship, had been preceded by a series of reports.
In 2017, 2019 and 2021, Erik Wanhatalo was reported for hitting Somayyeh. Each time she withdrew the report and she and her husband decided to try again.
In an interrogation in 2017, Somayyeh is asked if it hurt when her husband strangled her on the night in question when they were called there.
– A little but not very bad, it passed. You start to get used to it, she notes.
Later, she says to Erik Wanhatalo, in an audio file included in the evidence:
– You have become violent and you do not realize that you can cause great damage… You are completely, you get black eyes like this when you are angry.
13 interrogations – then he confessed
Erik Wanhatalo has admitted that he caused Somayyeh’s death, but he and his lawyer believe that the murder on February 13 last year was preceded by physical violence and outright death threats from the wife. He has said how it “went black for him”.
– It has been strongly provocative behavior with fist blows against him. There is no indication of any planning before the deed, it is an act of impulse in sudden anger, said his lawyer Charlie Tvärenvigg during the hearing.
However, the Solna district court believes that they cannot draw any other reasonable conclusion than that he killed her intentionally, that is, with deliberate intent.
Erik Wanhatalo has also stated as a mitigating circumstance that he finally told what happened to his wife and where he put her body – and that she would probably never have been found in the deep and difficult-to-find water otherwise.
But it actually took two months and 13 interrogations with some of Stockholm’s sharpest interrogators before the 44-year-old began to tell what happened to his wife, something that the district court believes is not seen as mitigating.
“She wanted to live”
Although Wanhatalo denies murder, he has previously said in interrogations:
– I’m sorry. I understand that I have robbed her of her life. She wanted to live and we had just received X (the son’s name) and we were both very happy about it.
Somayyeh’s family has previously told about the grief after her.
– It is not society that took her life. It’s the person she woke up and fell asleep with every day that killed her. We need to talk about this problem and this type of crime. Sasha, and others like her, must not be forgotten, says her brother Mojtaba.
On average, 16 women are killed per year by a man they once loved. A total of 343 women have been killed between the years 2000 and 2021 by a man they had a love relationship with, according to Aftonbladet’s long-term review Killed women.
