Danish inventor denies killing reporter, mutilating body

Stockholm. An eccentric Danish inventor who is being held over the grisly death of a Swedish reporter whose headless torso was found at sea has denied killing her and mutilating her body, police said Friday.

“The suspect denies homicide and desecration of a human body,” Copenhagen police said in a statement, referring to Peter Madsen, 46.

Madsen, held in formal custody since August 12 on suspicion of “negligent manslaughter”, says Wall died in an accident on board a submarine he built, claiming that he subsequently dumped her body in the sea south of Copenhagen.

And he denies cutting off her head and limbs.

Investigators say Wall’s body was “deliberately” mutilated and weighed down with a metal object to try and avoid detection.

She was last seen on board Madsen’s 60-foot (18-metre) Nautilus submarine on August 10 when she went to interview him. Investigators found traces of her blood inside the vessel.

Danish prosecutors are seeking to charge him with murder and have until September 5 to request an extension of his custody.

- Psychiatric evaluation -

Known for his foul temper and fallouts with former colleagues, Madsen, who describes himself as an “inventepreneur” on his website, is to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.

Wall was a freelance journalist who had reported for The New York Times and The Guardian. Her boyfriend reported her missing a day after the interview with Madsen.

That same day, Madsen was rescued from waters between Denmark and Sweden shortly before his submarine sank.

Investigators recovered and searched the sunken vessel, which police believe Madsen sank intentionally.

Madsen, who is reportedly married, has a reputation for histrionics and has angered many along his way.

The Nautilus was the biggest private sub ever made when Madsen built it in 2008 with help from a group of volunteers.

The volunteers were engaged in a dispute over the Nautilus between 2014 and 2015 before members of the board decided to transfer the vessel’s ownership to Madsen, according to the website.

- ‘Cursed’ -

In 2015, Madsen had sent a text message to two members of the board claiming: “there is a curse on Nautilus”.

“That curse is me. There will never be peace on Nautilus as long as I exist,” Madsen wrote, according to the volunteers.

Danish police are still searching for the clothes Wall wore on the submarine: an orange fleece, a skirt and white sneakers.

Wall was a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism who had planned to move to Beijing to pursue her career, former classmate Yan Cong said.

Wall had written about the earthquake-hit ruins of Haiti, the macabre torture chambers of Idi Amin’s Uganda, and Cubans using hard drives to access foreign culture.

“She gave voice to the weak, to the vulnerable and marginalised people,” her mother Ingrid Wall wrote in a Facebook post.

The news, which shocked and gripped people’s imagination around the world, has brought back to life a separate case about a Japanese tourist whose mutilated body was found in a Copenhagen harbour in 1986.

“We have taken note of that case, and we always do that routinely in homicides. We always check to see if there is anything related to the same case,” Copenhagen homicide chief Jens Moller-Jensen told reporters.

Kazuko Toyonaga, 22-year-old Japanese student, was on vacation in Europe before her legs were found in a plastic bag floating in the waters off Islands Brygge, a harbour in Copenhagen, according to Scandinavian media reports.  (AFP)