A Vinalhaven man has been convicted of making hundreds of threatening calls to the Swedish Embassy in Washington, D.C.
Eric Malmstrom, 40, was found guilty Monday in U.S. District Court of transmitting threatening interstate communications following a one-day jury trial, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
Malmstrom was charged by the U.S. Secret Service in March for calls he made to the Swedish Embassy between September 2017 and March 2018. Malmstrom would call the embassy, often leaving voicemails when no one picked up after hours, making violent threats against embassy employees, according to the criminal complaint filed by the Secret Service.
On three occasions, in February and March, Malmstrom made phone calls to the embassy threatening to slit an employee’s throat. These were just three of the hundreds of calls Malmstrom made to the embassy, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
On Oct. 10, Malmstrom called multiple times again, allegedly saying he wanted to stab them to death “for all pain that you [expletive] Swedes have caused me,” according to the complaint. In another call that day, he allegedly said he wanted to use a knife to assault “King Carl,” referring to Swedish monarch King Carl XVI Gustaf.
In one of the phone calls, he identified himself as Eric Malmstrom of Vinalhaven, Maine, and said he was of Swedish descent. In a welfare check made by the Knox County Sheriff’s Office in November 2017, Malmstrom denied making the phone calls but said he was upset with the Swedish government because he felt they ignored him on a previous visit to Sweden.
Malmstrom faces up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and up to three years of supervised release. He will be sentenced after the completion of a presentence investigation report by the U.S. Probation Office, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
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