Knutby, a village near Uppsala, became notorious across Sweden when Alexandra Fossmo, wife of Helge Fossmo, a pastor in the local pentecostal church, was found murdered in the early hours of January 10th 2004.

Fossmo was sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiracy to murder and attempted murder. He had sent text messages to nanny Sara Svensson to encourage her to murder his wife and his neighbour, who was married to his lover.

A Swedish Lutheran pastor who faked cellphone text messages from God to get his nanny-lover to murder his wife and try to kill the husband of a second mistress wants a new trial.

The pastor and his fiancée have been given the go-ahead for their wedding plans after the tax authorities ruled that there were no impediments to their marriage.

Sara Svensson, the nanny who murdered mother of the children she cared for in the Christian cult community in Knutby, is to be given leave from psychiatric hospital for Christmas, Aftonbladet reports.

The nanny admitted to two shooting, but claimed that she was being controlled by the manipulative pastor of a religious sect.

Police in Uppsala are to question the Knutby pastor Helge Fossmo after he admitted on Thursday that he was involved in the murder of his wife and the attempted murder of a neighbour in 2004. But the confession has been lambasted by a professor of psychology.

On January 10th 2004 Alexandra Fossmo was shot dead while she slept in the village of Knutby, not far from Uppsala. She was the wife of Pastor Helge Fossmo, one of the leaders of the extreme Pentecostal sect that dominated village life, and sister of the woman many claimed was the cult’s real leader, Asa Waldau – otherwise known as the Bride of Christ.

Despite having been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of his second wife in Knutby in January 2004, Pastor Helge Fossmo is still the legal guardian of his three children.

The life sentence handed down by the Court of Appeal in November to the pastor of Knutby will stand, following the Supreme Court's decision not to hear his appeal.

The pastor of Knutby, who is currently serving a life sentence for being an accessory to the murder of his wife and attempted murder of a neighbour, was back on the front pages this week as Aftonbladet revealed that he broke restrictions on his custody while the trial was in progress - by secretly making a TV antenna from the metal spirals of two notebooks.

Pastor Helge Fossmo has been sentenced by the Appeals Court to life imprisonment for the murder of his second wife, Alexandra, and for the attempted murder of a neighbour in January of this year. He was found not guilty of the murder of his first wife in 1999.

And so the cast of characters in the Knutby trial shuffles off into the wings, where they will wait nervously for the Appeal Court's verdict in two weeks' time.

There can't be a much trickier job in Sweden at the moment than being a judge in the Knutby Appeals hearing. An absence of evidence means they are unusually dependent upon the testimonies of the defendants, witnesses and experts. And unfortunately none of them seem to be able to agree.