The police's new grip - in the hunt for the rapist in Rågsved

Last spring, two women were assaulted by a knife-armed man near the Rågsved metro station in southern Stockholm.

A 23-year-old woman was first assaulted in a park area and later that night, a 25-year-old woman was forced into her apartment under a knife threat. However, the perpetrator left the scene because the woman's partner was at home.

Almost three months later, on June 14, a woman was assaulted and raped by a masked man in the same area. Three weeks later, on July 7, another woman was assaulted and raped in Rågsved.

The Stockholm Police are now looking at the connection between the four assaults that caused great concern in the area during the summer.

Among other things, the police operative analysis group has been helped to develop a so-called geographical profile of a suspected offender. The method aims to assess in which area the person has his or her fixed point.

- It is often a home, but it can also be a workplace or another place you often visit, says Jonas Hildeby, inspector and analyst at the police's national operational department, NOA.

By gathering information from witnesses and surveillance cameras, among other things, and looking at the perpetrator's pattern of movement before and after the crime, the police build a theory of where the person is living.

Geographical profiling has been used as a method of investigation in Sweden since 2004 and, among other things, gave successful hits during the investigation of the so-called Hagaman in Umeå and during the search for now murdered Peter Mangs in Malmö.

The method can be particularly effective in investigating so-called emotional crimes, which include, for example, assault rapes, Jonas Hilldeby explains.

- There we can often limit the areas more specifically compared to so-called rational crimes such as burglaries and robberies.

Jonas Hildeby does not want to comment on specific details regarding the Rågsveds investigation but says that an oral report has been submitted to the Stockholm Police, which will be supplemented by a written report this week.

No one has yet been arrested for the assaults. The police have secured DNA from one of the rapes but received no hit. We are still awaiting results from the technical investigation into the second rape.

According to Dagens Nyheter, there are similarities in the signal elements stated by the vulnerable women by the suspected perpetrator. However, the Stockholm Police do not want to confirm just that information.

- For the time being, I do not want to be more specific than investigative for technical reasons, but we look at two cases of illegal threats and two cases of rape that have taken place in a certain geographical area and where there may be similarities in the approach, says Anna Nilsson, in coarse crime at the Police in Stockholm sew in a written response to SVT Nyheter.

- Those who work with geographical profiling can hopefully give us a better picture of the perpetrator, she says.