Kim Wall: Severed head of Swedish journalist discovered after disappearance on Danish submarine trip

Body parts were inside weighted plastic bags, authorities say

Swedish journalist Kim Wall (AP)

The head of Swedish journalist Kim Wall has been discovered two months after she disappeared during a submarine trip in Denmark.

Wall, a widely travelled foreign correspondent, was allegedly murdered in August aboard a submarine owned by Danish inventor Peter Madsen.

Copenhagen police investigator Jens Moeller Jensen said her head, legs and clothes were found on Friday inside plastic bags, with a knife and “heavy metal pieces” to make them sink, near where Ms Wall’s naked, decapitated torso was found in August.

Mr Madsen, who is in pre-trial detention, has said Ms Wall died after being accidentally hit by a heavy hatch in the submarine, but police have said 15 stab wounds were found on the torso found at sea off Copenhagen on 21 August.

A police spokesman told reporters in Copenhagen that there were no fractures in Wall’s cranium. Her arms are still missing. The cause of death has not been established.

A police prosecutor said earlier this week that officers had found images “which we presume to be real” of women being strangled and decapitated on Peter Madsen’s computer in a laboratory he ran.

Mr Madsen said the computer searched by police was not his but was used by everyone in the laboratory.

The inventor told a court Wall had died when a heavy hatch inside the submarine that he was holding open swung shut. “I lose my foothold and the hatch shuts,” he said. “Kim had been severely hurt and was laying with an intense bleeding. There was a pool of blood where she had landed.”

He said he had tried to bury her at sea and intended to take his own life inside the submarine.

Wall was an experienced foreign correspondent who had reported from Uganda, Haiti and Sri Lanka. Her mother said after she was found dead: “She gave voice to the weak, vulnerable and marginalised people. That voice had been needed for a long, long time, now it has been silenced.”

Additional reporting by agencies