'Swedish Fritzl' accused of imprisoning woman in bunker

Woman says Dr Martin Trenneborg kept her prisoner for six days and was planning another abduction

Martin Trenneborg
Swedish police photo of the bunker where Trenneborg is accused of imprisoning his victim
(Image credit: Swedish Police Authority)

A doctor dubbed the "Swedish Josef Fritzl" is to stand trial on Monday, charged with abducting a woman and imprisoning her in a bunker at his remote country home.

Dr Martin Trenneborg, 38, is believed to have met his victim, an unnamed woman in her 30s, after posing as a wealthy US stockbroker, The Independent reports. On their second date, she claims he came to her flat in Stockholm and gave her chocolate-covered strawberries laced with Rohypnol, the so-called "date-rape" drug.

The woman says he then raped her before taking her in a wheelchair to his car, using rubber masks to hide his identity, and that when she woke, she was 350 miles away in a bunker alongside Trenneborg's isolated house in south Sweden.

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"It felt like one long nightmare," the woman told police, according to the Daily Mail. "When I woke up I had two needles stuck into my arm. He was sitting on a chair beside the bed."

Prosecutors say that for six days, Trenneborg continued to rape the woman and feed her sedatives, telling her no one would hear her cries for help behind the bunker's metal doors and reinforced walls.

It is alleged that he planned to keep her prisoner for years and told her about other women he planned to kidnap, including a celebrity and her own mother.

He was arrested after the woman's disappearance made the news and he took her to a police station under orders to say she was fine. Concerned officers took her aside, where she told them what had happened.

When detectives searched the property, they found more drug-laced strawberries, as well as syringes and rubber masks.

The case has been likened to that of Austrian Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter locked up in a cellar for 24 years.

Trenneborg denies raping the woman and is asking to be tried on a lower charge of deprivation of liberty. His lawyer claims he "never meant to hurt anyone”, calling her client a “very sad and depressed person who wanted a partner".

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