Posted on April 24, 2008

Take Care in Paris, Sweden Urges Young Women

Reuters, April 24, 2008

Sweden has urged its young women not to go out alone in Paris at night after a Swedish teenager was abducted and murdered in the French capital.

The charred body of Sussanna Zetterberg, 19, was discovered on Saturday in woods outside Paris just hours after she left a nightclub in the heart of the city.

“I am in a taxi, the driver is odd,” Zetterberg said in a text message to a friend. She was not heard from again.

A postmortem showed she had been stabbed, a judicial source said. French press reported she had also been shot four times and was found with her hands tied behind her back.

Prosecutors are investigating whether there are any links with a case in February when another 19-year-old Swede was raped by a man who had posed as a taxi driver.

The Swedish embassy said on Thursday it had issued a warning to Swedish women via its national press.

“You can’t be too careful down here. You shouldn’t be out alone at night and moving about the city. You need to make sure to stay in groups and take every possible precaution,” Swedish ambassador to France, Gunnar Lund, was quoted as saying in the Swedish press.