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Home / World

Danish teenage girl stabbed mother to death after watching Isil videos with Islamist boyfriend

Richard Orange
Daily Telegraph UK·
16 Sep, 2015 04:07 AM4 mins to read

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Lisa Borch, then 15, attacked Tina Römer Holtegaard while she slept in her bed in her home in Kvissel, a tiny village near the northern tip of Jutland last October. Photo / Instagram

Lisa Borch, then 15, attacked Tina Römer Holtegaard while she slept in her bed in her home in Kvissel, a tiny village near the northern tip of Jutland last October. Photo / Instagram

Lisa Borch was 15 when she stabbed her mother 20 times after becoming radicalised by an Iraqi boyfriend she reportedly met at a refugee centre.

A Danish teenager stabbed her own mother to death after becoming radicalised by watching Islamic State videos of beheadings with an Islamist boyfriend twice her age.

Lisa Borch, then 15, attacked Tina Römer Holtegaard while she slept in her bed in her home in Kvissel, a tiny village near the northern tip of Jutland last October.

She stabbed her victim 20 times after spending hours on YouTube watching footage of the decapitations of the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant (Isil)'s victims David Haines and Alan Henning.

The court heard how Ms Borch and Iraqi Bakhtiar Mohammed Abdulla, 39, the radical Muslim boyfriend sentenced for carrying out the murder with her, relaxed in the evenings by watching bloody Isil executions on YouTube.

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After the murder, Ms Borch rang the police to report the crime.

She told police: "I heard my mother scream and I looked out the window and saw a white man running away. Please come here, there is blood everywhere." Then she calmly waited, the court heard.

When the police arrived, they discovered her calmly playing watching videos on her iPhone. When they asked where her mother was, she pointed upstairs without even pausing what she was watching.

The court heard how she had been radicalised by an unnamed Muslim man, who had broken off the relationship to return to Sweden. She reportedly then met Mr Abdulla at a refugee centre near her home.

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Jens Holtegaard, Ms Borch's stepfather, said that his stepdaughter remained a strong supporter of Isil,and said he feared she would become more radicalised during her nine-year sentence.

"Lisa is completely uncritically enthusiastic about everything related to the immigrant community. She loves to talk about Isil and their brutal behaviour in the Middle East," he said. "I dare not imagine what she can develop into during imprisonment."

Prosecutors told the court that Ms Borch had planned to travel to Syria to flight alongside Isil.

A forensic analysis of Ms Borch's computer revealed that she had watched videos of the beheadings carried out by Mohammed Emwazi or Jihadi John, the British Isil fighter who tops Britain's kill list of terrorist targets in Syria.

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It also emerged in the trial that Ms Borch had showed her twin sister the knife she was going to use to kill their mother, something her sister tragically dismissed as a joke.

During the trial, Ms Borch claimed that Mr Abdulla carried out the murder.

He in turn claimed that he was innocent, and had arrived at the house when Ms Holtegaard was already dead.

As the court could not establish who had carried out the stabbing, both were found guilty.

The court heard that Ms Borch had rowed so frequently with her mother over her obsession with militant Islam and her relationship with Mr Abdullah that her twin sister had felt compelled to leave the house.

Mr Holtegaard told Denmark's BT newspaper that he believed Abdullah had radicalised her.

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"There is no doubt that she was in very bad company when she began to hang out with him. He affected her negatively," her stepfather told the newspaper. "It was when she was with him, that she began to take an interest in IS (Isil). He has somehow radicalised her, and I think that's where you have to find a large part of the explanation of why we are where we are today."

He said that there was little sign of the psychopathic tendencies found by the court psychologists

"I never in my wildest dreams imagined that she could think of doing such a thing. She had a mother who loved her and did everything she could to help her," he said.

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