A 53-year-old woman was stabbed to death in Hardenberg on Thursday after telling someone on the phone she was terrified of her husband, prosecutors and a judge said at a hearing in Zwolle.
The woman left the children’s center where she worked at about 4:45 p.m., got into her car and was allegedly attacked after her husband smashed a side window, the court heard. She succumbed to her injuries more than half an hour later.
“You had threatened her. She would not live to be 54. She was terrified,” the judge told the suspect in Zwolle District Court on Thursday.
Hans H. admits he stabbed her. “Apparently it was me, yes,” he said, according to news agency ANP. He told the court he had sought out his wife at work “to seek redress” and that “I thought I was bugged and chased by her,” ANP reported.
The man is also suspected of assaulting his wife and one of his daughters more than a week earlier; a restraining order was issued after that alleged assault. At the start of the hearing, Hans H.’s lawyer asked for the case to be adjourned to examine the possibility of tbs with conditions. The prosecutor opposed the request and the court denied it.
Femicide debate
Femicide or feminicide is the intentional killing of women (or girls) because she is a woman,” the prosecution reports. The prosecution said that makes the term difficult to apply because motive can be hard to prove.
Professor Marieke Liem of Leiden University, who maintains the Femicide Monitor, said there is an average of forty murders of women per year. The website notes that not every murder of a woman is necessarily femicide. “There are also cases where the incident had nothing to do with gender,” it says.
Until there is a “proper scientific way to make this distinction,” the Femicide Monitor tracks all murders of women, the site says.
