Suspected Stockholm truck attacker Rakhmat Akilov, a 39-year-old Uzbek and jihadist sympathiser, admitted on Tuesday to committing a “terrorist crime” by mowing down pedestrians on a busy street, killing four people and injuring 15 others. 

“Akilov confesses to a terrorist crime and accepts his custody detention,” his lawyer Johan Eriksson told a custody hearing in a Stockholm district court. 

Akilov, who was arrested in a Stockholm suburb just hours after Friday’s attack, appeared in the courthouse’s special heavily-guarded, high-security courtroom. Handcuffed and wearing a thick green hoodie over his head, he kept his head bowed down. 

Judge Malou Lindblom ordered him to remove the hoodie and he complied, revealing dark hair with streaks of grey. Akilov, a Russian speaker, had an interpreter at his side to help him follow the proceedings. 

He did not address the court directly. After Eriksson’s statement, the judge consented to the prosecution’s request to have the rest of the hearing held behind closed doors due to the classified nature of the information in the investigation. 

After about an hour, journalists were readmitted into the courtroom and the judge remanded Akilov in custody. Court documents seen by AFP showed Akilov, who is facing life behind bars, had requested that his state-appointed lawyer Johan Eriksson be replaced by a Sunni Muslim, saying “only a lawyer of this faith could assert his interests in the best way”. 

The court refused the request. The four people killed in the attack were two Swedes — one woman and an 11-year-old girl — a British man, and a Belgian woman. Eight people were still in hospital, two of whom were in critical condition. 

Akilov, a construction worker who had been refused permanent residency in Sweden in June 2016, had gone underground last year after receiving a deportation order, police said.