WARNING: Graphic content.
With AAP
Danish divers have found the decapitated head, legs and clothes of Kim Wall, the Swedish journalist who was killed after boarding a Danish inventor’s submarine in August.
The body parts and clothing were found on Friday in plastic bags with a knife and “heavy metal pieces” to make them sink, near where 30-year-old Wall’s naked headless torso was found in August, Copenhagen police investigator Jens Moeller Jensen said.
Moeller Jensen said there were no fractures to Wall’s skull and he declined to comment on the discovery of the knife.
The cause of death is yet to be determined but Peter Madsen, the 46-year-old Danish inventor who is in pre-trial detention on preliminary manslaughter charges, has claimed Wall died after being accidentally hit by a 70-kilogram hatch on the UC3 Nautillus submarine.
Madsen claims he then disposed of the body at sea.
However police said they found 15 stabs wounds on Wall’s torso and her arms are yet to be recovered.
Wall was last seen alive on August 10 on board the 40-ton, nearly 18 metre-long submarine as it left Copenhagen.
The freelance journalist was there to interview Madsen for an article for Wired Magazine. Madsen is famous for building the sub via crowdfunding in 2008, and for his company RML Spacelab, which plans to be the first to launch a human being into space in an amateur-built rocket.
The next afternoon Madsen was winched to safety by a nearby boat as the Nautilus sunk to the depths of Koge Bay. He claimed “technical issues” and a “minor problem with a ballast tank” had caused the submarine to sink.
Wall was nowhere to be seen and police immediately had their suspicions, believing Madsen had deliberately sank the vessel. The next day Madsen was charged with manslaughter.
Madsen initially claimed he dropped the journalist off at Refshale Island at 11.30pm on August 10, but her boyfriend reportedly alerted police on Friday morning that she hadn’t returned.
After a wide-scale air, land and sea search, police found her naked torso near Copenhagen on August 22.
During their investigation, police have found videos on Madsen’s personal computer of women being tortured, decapitated and murdered. The videos are considered to be real, according to prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen.
Investigators believe Madsen killed Wall between August 10 and 11, cut up her body and attached a belt with a pipe to the torso with the purpose of making it sink, officials said, adding that her head, arms and legs had been deliberately cut off after her death.
A court-ordered psychiatric evaluation of Madsen is pending and the inventor will appear in court again on October 31.