An inventor who built a submarine has been charged with murder after it sank in the waters in Denmark on Friday.
Hours later, the police said Madsen had been charged with the murder of a female journalist from Sweden, who had been aboard the submarine earlier.
It was the woman’s boyfriend who alerted authorities the submarine was missing early Friday. Two helicopters and three ships combed the sea from Copenhagen to the Baltic Sea island of Bornholm.
“Whether the woman was on board the submarine at the time of her disappearance is unclear,” police said in a statement.
Madsen denied the charges and said he had dropped the woman off in Copenhagen on Thursday night, according to the police.
The police in Sweden said they had tried without success to contact the woman by phone. Her family had not heard from her.
The woman was a journalist writing about Madsen and his submarine, Swedish and Danish media reported.
Police said the submarine was found on the seabed in Koge Bay, south of Copenhagen, at a depth of seven metres. Divers had not been able to enter the vessel.
Madsen, an entrepreneur known as an artist, submarine builder and aerospace engineer, will go before a judge for preliminary questioning on Saturday.
The submarine, UC3 Nautilus, is nearly 18-metres long, and one of three constructed by Madsen and funded by crowdsourcing. It can carry eight people.
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