Available since January 7 on Netflix, the series Crime at the root is currently a hit with the platform’s subscribers, establishing itself among the most viewed productions of the moment. If you have already watched all four episodes, you are certainly wondering if the mini-series is inspired by a true story. We’ll explain it to you.
After ending the year in style with the Norwegian series The PalmNetflix is starting 2025 in the best possible way with Crime at the roota new thriller series, also made up of four episodes, this time taking us to Sweden. So, is the Swedish miniseries inspired by real events?
Crime at the root: an investigation into a “cold case”
Directed by Lisa Siwe, Crime at the root – The breakthrough in its Swedish title and The Breakthrough in its English version – is a four-episode mini-series which will definitely please fans of criminal cases, and more particularly police investigations aimed at solving them. The series traces the unprecedented collaboration – at least in Europe – between a police investigator and a genealogist in order to elucidate a double homicide dating from 2004. Sixteen years after the case, considered the second largest murder case in the history of Sweden, the tandem manages to elucidate it and identify the culprit. A captivating and poignant mini-series, detailing the different stages of the investigation while highlighting the families of the victims, until then unable to mourn.
A series inspired by a macabre news item
If the series is so realistic and intense, it is precisely because it is based on a double homicide that actually occurred in 2004 in Sweden. The tragic news item took place on October 19, 2004, in Åsgatan, a residential area in the center of Linköping. While on his way to school, 8-year-old Mohammed Ammouri was brutally attacked and stabbed to death. Anna-Lena Svensson, a 56-year-old teacher who witnessed the macabre spectacle, tried to help the child and in turn died from the killer’s stab wounds.
It was necessary to wait sixteen long years, not without theories and unsuccessful leads, before identifying Daniel Nyqvist. Aged 37 at the time of his arrest in 2020, the killer was, as the Netflix mini-series tells it, identified thanks to the collaboration of Jan Egon Staaf, Swedish police investigator, and Peter Sjölund, genealogist. During the investigation, the scientist notably allowed the police to have access to Nyqvist’s family tree, and therefore to facilitate the DNA comparison in order to avoid committing any miscarriage of justice.
During the trial in October 2020, Daniel Nyqvist will admit to having committed these two murders for no reason, simply mentioning hearing voices that would have told him ”ordered to kill someone”. At the end of the verdict, probably based on the expertise of psychiatrists, the murderer escapes prison and is sentenced ”indefinitely” to psychiatric hospitalization.
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Head over to Netflix now to watch the mini-series Crime at the root.
Source : IMDb, DMT
