A man has been sentenced to detention after the Sermersooq District Court found him guilty of the murder of his girlfriend in Nuuk in August 2025.
Sermersooq Circuit Court in Nuuk found a 30-year-old man guilty of killing a woman by violence and strangulation on Tuesday afternoon. The victim was his girlfriend, a 44-year-old woman.
The court considers the convicted man so dangerous that the law’s strictest measure comes into play: the man is thus sentenced to detention for an indefinite period.
– We have found you guilty of murder. Our justification is the presented documentation from the autopsy. There is an indication that she died from a strangulation, said the circuit judge when reading out the verdict late on Tuesday afternoon.
The 30-year-old man admitted in court that the woman had died after a confrontation between the two, which took place on the night between 6 and 7 August 2025 at their shared residence in Blok M in Nuuk.
However, the man did not confess to manslaughter. According to himself, he had defended himself against the woman’s attack with a knife and did not want to kill her. He had also tried to save her with first aid, he claimed on Tuesday.
– He changes his explanation like the wind blows, said prosecutor Kristian Buskov, referring to the 30-year-old man’s different interpretations of the course during the case.
The Magistrate’s Court did not buy the defendant’s new explanation either. The judge found that he had done nothing to save the woman’s life after he had beaten and strangled her.
Expert opinions pointed towards detention
During Tuesday, the court heard from four witnesses who were in contact with the main characters in the case in different ways. Among them was the murdered woman’s daughter, who confirmed that there was a violent relationship between the victim and the perpetrator.
– My mother was often beaten by him, she said.
However, no witnesses were present in the bedroom where the woman died. The closest was the victim’s mother, who was in the kitchen.
The choice of detention as a measure was supported by the mental examination and an opinion from the Council of Forensic Medicine.
Among other things, it emerged that the man is largely indifferent to other people’s thoughts and feelings and unable to understand them. In addition, an abuse of alcohol and cannabis sharpened the experts’ assessment of the man’s dangerousness.
Deviant personality
The convict allegedly has a “severely deviant personality structure”. However, he is not insane and he is normally gifted.
The prosecutor also pointed out a previous case in which the now convicted man had also strangled an ex-girlfriend and stabbed her with a knife. At that time, however, without a fatal outcome.
Defense attorney Finn Meinel argued that his client had acted out of necessity. He also believed that detention was too far-reaching a measure, even if the court found his client guilty.
However, this did not change the court’s decision. But the 30-year-old man still has the option of appealing the sentence to Greenland’s High Court. He has two weeks after the verdict to consider whether he wants that.
