'Laser Man' murderer starts prison blog

Convicted killer and serial sniper John Ausonius, who terrorized Stockholm in the early 1990s by attacking foreigners and immigrants, has started a blog about life on the inside, his fiancée, and starring in a Waiting for Godot-inspired prison play.

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With two entries to date, Ausonius, 59, opens his heart about his fiancée and wanting to meet her friends so they can come to grips with her "somewhat discussed choice of sweetheart".

Ausonius, who was convicted in 1993 of one murder, but was also suspected of 11 attacks that earned him the nickname Laser Man (Lasermannen) because he used a laser on his rifle scope, was recently transferred from a high-security prison and there given the right to blog.

In his second post, he speaks about taking part in the play. He was told he could invite his fianceé's friends to a prison play entitled Who will jump first?.

But prison officials revoked the decision one week before Ausonius went on stage.

On the blog, the decision prompted a few paragraphs questioning bureaucratic hiccups and "poor internal communication" between prison personnel.

A disappointed-sounding Ausonius wrote that social networks were important for inmates.

He then spent a few sentences discussing cutbacks to prison staff, saying inmates were let out of their cells an hour later in the morning following scaled-back staff in 2005.

Ausonius is serving a life sentence, which in Sweden can either be fixed-term or open-ended.

Convicted criminals with fixed-term life sentences must nowadays serve a minimum of two-thirds of the period before applying for parole.

No such guiding rule of thumb exists for open-ended life sentences.

Ausonius has unsuccessfully appealed to have his sentence converted to a fixed-term sentence three times, according to the newspaper Aftonbladet.

Visitors to his blog mostly left comments asking Ausonius to speak about how he felt about the racially-motivated crimes that he committed two decades ago.

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