Laurence Dollimore
FOUR men have been arrested for allegedly hacking two Scandinavian backpackers to death in Morocco.
Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, from Denmark, and Maren Ueland, 28, from Norway, were slaughtered while camping in the Atlas Mountains.
It comes after a video of one of the women being beheaded was uploaded online.
The attack has shocked the north African country, a popular holiday destination for expats and locals in southern Spain and one of the more liberal countries on the continent.
Their bodies were found on Monday morning.
The sickening footage, which was shared on social media, shows a blonde woman screaming while a man cuts her neck with what appears to be a sharp kitchen knife.
One of the women was decapitated and the other was found dead with a severe neck wound, suggesting they had attempted to decapitate her.
French hikers stumbled upon the horrific scene, finding one of the women inside their tent and the other just outside.
“It was horrible. They were broken,” one of the French hikers said.
“We warned everyone we saw in Imlil not to go up there. I did not want more to see what we had seen…It was a big shock, we’re thinking about it all day. It makes you think about what’s important in life.”
Four suspects are believed to have had links to ISIS and had sworn allegiance to the terrorist group.
In the horrific video, a man can be heard saying in French: “This is for Syria, here are the heads of your Gods.”
The bodies were found in a remote mountainous region, 10 kilometers from the village of Imlil.
The two women were enjoying a four-week trip in Morocco and were staying with three others.
Reports say they were last seen with some local men who were guiding them, but that there was another group of men ‘not from the area’.
One hotelier said: “Three homeless men came from Marrakech and pitched a tent right next to the girls’ tent. The men were not from round here.”
Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen branded the deaths a ‘beastly crime’.
“We do not know the circumstances, but a lot suggests that the brutal killing was an act of terror, and there’s a video on social media,” he said.
The Norwegian Department of Foreign Affairs, however, said the killings were unlikely to be the work of more established terrorist groups, but that the group of men may have been inspired by ISIS.
The killers likely stalked the pair before attacking them while they slept on Monday, investigators say.
Morocco, a tourism hotspot, has been battling with Islamic extremism for years with thousands of Moroccans having joined ISIS since its inception.
