A mother’s murder sparked uproar in Latvia, where law enforcement has been blamed for doing too little to protect victims in the European Union’s leading nation for intentional homicides.
(Bloomberg) — A mother’s murder sparked uproar in Latvia, where law enforcement has been blamed for doing too little to protect victims in the European Union’s leading nation for intentional homicides.
The woman was stabbed to death by her 53-year-old former partner, who killed her in front of their child and the woman’s mother. The man fled the crime scene and is being sought. The identity of the victim was not released by local officials.
Public anger has mainly focused on the fact that the alleged assailant was the subject of 19 criminal probes and that he had followed, harassed and attacked his ex-partner. At times he called her at work 1,000 times a day, according to co-workers who spoke to local media. Her calls to authorities for protection were ignored.
“This woman did everything correctly, she did everything to save her life,” Latvian President Egils Levits said in an interview with Latvian TV on Tuesday. “All the blame is on the state’s side.”
Even as law enforcement has been given more power to forcibly separate victims from abusers, Latvia and Lithuania led the EU in intentional homicides per capita in 2020, according to the most recent available data from Eurostat. Out of all victims in Latvia, 60% were women, the highest in the EU.
The Baltic neighbors have also ranked near the top for suicides and alcohol consumption, pointing to more social problems in nations that freed themselves of communism in the early 1990s.
–With assistance from Milda Seputyte.
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