In Bulgaria, a 25-year-old French man is indicted for the murder of his Finnish girlfriend. He is accused of killing her with a laptop cable last year and hiding her body in the apartment’s wardrobe.
Sofia City Prosecutor’s Office on May 4 filed an indictment in the Sofia City Court against a 25-year-old French citizen. He is accused of the murder of his 22-year-old Finnish girlfriend by strangulation with a laptop charger last year.
The one-year investigation into the case has been completed. According to the supervising prosecutor, Thomas T. intentionally killed Sonya K. in the apartment she rented on Vladayska Street in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital city.
The two lived together, shared the apartment as a couple, and worked remotely, in I.T. for the French man and as a call center employee for the victim.
The woman died on May 8 last year and was found dead in a bag in the apartment’s wardrobe.
According to the prosecutor’s office document, the victim complained to her friends that 2,500 euros (2,760 dollars) were missing from her bank account a few days before her death. She suspected someone had hacked her mobile phone with malware and gained access to her bank account. She planned a trip to Finland to visit the bank and file a report to the police, a plan the accused knew of.
She told her sister that money she had hidden in the apartment was missing. She also shared she spoke to T. T., as referred in the documents, and was sure he didn’t take the money.
According to the prosecutor, an altercation occurred on May 7 between the victim and the accused. The latter allegedly became aggressive and inflicted blows on the head and body of S. K., from which she received a bruise on the left temple muscle and bruises on her body and limbs.
The next day, another argument occurred again between the two. According to the prosecutor’s office, the French man allegedly grabbed the victim’s neck and choked her. She resisted, but when the resistance decreased, T.T. allegedly wrapped a laptop cable five times around the victim’s neck, thus “depriving her of life,” the prosecutor claims. After killing his girlfriend, the man would have put her body in a bag and placed it in the closet.
On May 8, 2022, S.K. was supposed to meet with friends, but T.T. wrote to one of them to say she did not come home after going out for a run and started looking for her with them. He then reported to the police she was missing. He gave the same version to the investigators.
Inspectors found the body in the wardrobe the next day and the accused was put in custody. He said he was innocent before the magistrates of Sofia City Court.
He told them that two weeks before her death, Sonya noticed that money had started disappearing from her bank accounts. The two then decided to withdraw all the money from their accounts to hide it in the apartment. According to the accused, they agreed to go out separately so that someone would always be in the apartment to keep an eye on the money. But they had to be absent at the same time once, and that was when the money disappeared.
The court decided to keep the accused in pre-trial detention.
According to Bulgarian news media, only DNA from T.T. and S.K. were found on the laptop cable, and forensics analysis of the victim’s fingernail didn’t find the DNA of another person.
According to Finnish media, the ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland didn’t want to communicate about the case for privacy reasons.
