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Danish teen who stabbed mum may have been inspired by IS
A Danish teenager who admitted to regularly watching jihadist videos online has been sentenced to nine years in prison for stabbing her mother to death together with an Iraqi friend.
Copenhagen: A Danish teenager who admitted to regularly watching jihadist videos online has been sentenced to nine years in prison for stabbing her mother to death together with an Iraqi friend.
Lisa Borch, then 15, and her 29-year-old friend Bakhtiar Mohammed Abdullah were convicted Tuesday of killing Tina Romer Holtegaard in her sleep by repeated stabs to the chest.
"She has said herself that she sometimes watches Islamic State videos," prosecutor Karina Skou told AFP. The investigation did not determine which videos the defendant had seen.
A court in the northern town of Hjorring dismissed claims by Borch that she had seen "a white man running" from her home the night of the murder.
"It can be indisputedly upheld that Lisa Borch during the emergency call pretended to give CPR" in the bedroom "even though she was actually in the workshop," the district court said in its ruling.
After her mother went to bed, the girl claimed to have been watching TV and admitted to having watched "something with IS" on her mother`s iPad.
Asked if the video clips had included IS beheadings, she said she couldn`t remember.
The events took place in October 2014 in the northern village of Kvissel.
A forensic investigation found that there had been Internet searches made for mass executions on a laptop belonging to Abdullah, who claimed Borch was responsible for them.
The 29-year-old Iraqi was sentenced to 13 years in prison, after which he will be deported.
"Lisa showed him pictures on her phone of guns and machine guns, but that was not something he was interested in," his testimony read.
However, the prosecutor said Islamic radicalisation "had not been a major theme" in the case.
"It could very well have been someone who was subjected to something cruel," she said of the video clips.
The girl`s stepfather, Jens Holtegaard, said she had become "more and more introverted" in the spring of 2014 but had been denied psychiatric care by the authorities.
They "wouldn`t do anything because Lisa was not sick enough," he told tabloid BT.
Borch and Abdullah have both appealed their convictions.