THE ULTIMATE SCANDI THRILLER
The shooting of Swedish premier Olof Palme in 1986 became one of the most notorious unsolved murders of the century, obsessing Dragon Tattoo author Stieg Larsson. Now the police reckon they’ve got their man — 20 years after he killed himself!
THE shots that killed Olof Palme left behind not just a body and a pool of blood but a murder mystery that would endure for more than 30 years.
It was shortly after 11pm on Friday, February 28, 1986 and Sweden’s colourful but divisive prime minister was walking through the freezing streets of Stockholm with his wife Lisbet.
The couple were without their bodyguard, having sent him home earlier that day before deciding to visit a local cinema, which was showing a well-reviewed new film called The Brothers Mozart. After leaving the auditorium, they had said goodbye to their son Marten and his girlfriend, who had come along too, and started walking back to their apartment. At 11.21pm, the killer struck. A man emerged from the shadows, wandered calmly up behind Palme, pulled a Smith & Wesson Magnum revolver from his pocket and fired two rounds. One grazed Lisbet, causing minor injuries. The other entered the back of Palme’s neck and severed his carotid artery, killing him almost instantly.
The assailant, who wore a dark jacket, was seen jogging away down an alley. He went up a flight of steps towards a busy road and effectively disappeared. His victim was taken to hospital and pronounced dead on arrival shortly after midnight. That was more than 34 years ago. Over the intervening decades, police have dedicated hundreds of thousands of hours and more than 600 million krone [£51.2 million] to tracking down the killer, filling a warehouse with 250 shelves full of case files, 11 of them dedicated to audio and video recordings.
More than 130 people have falsely confessed to being the mysterious killer in black. And as recently as last month, the five detectives still working full-time on the investigation were receiving between three and four tip-offs a week.
One of the many colourful lines of inquiry was the subject of extensive research by the late Stieg Larsson, Swedish author of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, who spent years researching claims that Palme was murdered in an elaborate plot orchestrated by South African spies.
Indeed, the dramatic circumstances of this grisly assassination on the streets of Stockholm could have leapt straight from the script of one of the so-called Scandi Noir dramas — such as The Killing, The Bridge and Wallander — that have so captivated British audiences in recent years.
BUT now, finally, the police’s work is done. And they do not believe Stieg Larsson’s theory. Instead, at a press conference yesterday morning, Krister Petersson, the prosecutor leading the inquiry, identified Palme’s likely assassin as one Stig Engstrom, a former soldier and member of a Stockholm gun club.
There is, Petersson said, ‘reasonable evidence’ Engstrom carried out the crime because he detested the prime minister’s socialist beliefs.
‘We can’t get around one person as the perpetrator: he is Stig Engstrom,’ declared Petersson. ‘How he acted is how we believe the murderer would have acted... he was also part of a circle that was very strongly critical of Olof Palme and his politics.’
Engstrom worked in a nearby office and was one of about 20 witnesses who came forward to say they were present at the murder scene.
However, only a court can pronounce him definitively guilty, Petersson added. And because the suspect killed himself in 2000 at the age of 66, no proper trial can now take place.
With this in mind, police chiefs have decided there is little point in continuing their costly inquiries, so one of the world’s longest murder investigations has been closed.
Stig Engstrom had first emerged as a major suspect two years ago, after a Swedish journalist contacted police with evidence that Engstrom might have borrowed the murder weapon from a firearms dealer he had met at a gun club.
The journalist described the man as a loner with few prospects whose career had stalled, resulting in a ‘drive to be recognised, to make something of himself’.
Police took DNA samples from Engstrom’s relatives, while the Press promptly dubbed him ‘Skandia man’ because he worked at the head office of the Skandia insurance company close to the murder scene.
Palme’s son Marten announced that Engstrom’s description matched that of a man seen loitering outside the cinema, while a pedestrian who witnessed the shots being fired said he thought it ‘very possible’ that Engstrom was the killer.
The conflicting witness statements Engstrom gave led detectives to conclude his story didn’t add up.
That it should have taken so long to identify him as the killer is due partly to appalling flaws in the initial police investigation, in which vital clues were missed. The crime scene was not secured, which led to the wrongful arrest of one innocent man and the wrongful conviction of another.
Then there were the many enemies Palme made in his political career.
The son of a rich industrialist, Palme (whose name is pronounced ‘ulof Palmer’) was born in 1927 and had a privileged upbringing before embracing socialism after World War II.
Elected to the Swedish parliament in 1957 for the Left- wing Social Democratic Party, he became prime minister in 1969 and began a rapid expansion of his country’s welfare state, increasing taxes, strengthening trade unions, extending free
childcare and giving tub-thumping speeches about inequality.
But if his domestic policies riled opponents at home, it was Palme’s pronouncements on foreign affairs — at the time of the Cold War — that made headlines elsewhere.
Attacked for his perceived support of Moscow and endorsement of communist regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua, he vigorously opposed the war in Vietnam, once comparing the U.S. bombing of Hanoi to the Nazi construction of the Treblinka death camp.
PALME was also a leading opponent of apartheidera South Africa, calling for sanctions against the white government in both his first term as PM, which continued until 1976, and a second that stretched from 1982 until his death.
His stances on these and other issues were why his assassination gave rise to so many conspiracy theories linking the killing to vested interests.
The first suspect to be arrested, just 17 days into the investigation, was drug addict Victor Gunnarsson, who was allegedly linked to far-Right groups. Several witnesses claimed he had made hateful comments about Palme in the runup to the shooting.
Particles found on Gunnarsson’s clothing also suggested he had recently fired a gun — but this was not proven to be the murder weapon and he was soon released, though he was kept under observation by a secret task force.
They failed to turn up any new evidence and Gunnarsson later emigrated to the U.S., where — to the excitement of conspiracy theorists — his body was found in 1994 in woods in North Carolina, with two gunshot wounds to the head.
Next in the police’s sights was the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, a group that in the early 1980s had murdered several of its former members, leading Palme to classify it as a terrorist organisation. But although 22 arrests were made in January 1987 after police raids on the homes of several suspected members and at a bookshop linked to the group, no one was ever charged with the crime.
fast forward two years and the focus shifted to petty criminal Christer Pettersson (no relation to the prosecutor), who bore a strong resemblance to e-fit pictures of the suspect that had just been made public.
He was then identified by both Palme’s widow Lisbet and his son Marten at a police ID parade, and jailed for life for the assassination, in 1989, after a trial in which the judges were split.
Pettersson was freed on appeal later that year, after it emerged that police had ‘contaminated’ the line-up by telling the witnesses he was an alcoholic.
By then, other wild theories about the killing were doing the rounds. Some blamed a cohort of Swedish police officers with farRight views (who were rumoured to have celebrated Palme’s murder by drinking champagne), while others pointed the finger at Sweden’s own security services.
Naturally, the KGB was also blamed: at a secret meeting in Switzerland, Soviet agents had supposedly entertained the idea of having Palme ‘swept away’ for refusing to follow the orders of Kremlin handlers.
A 2005 book called Blood On The Snow linked the murder to claims that Palme intended to block a lucrative deal for the Swedish arms firm Bofors to supply the Indian government with artillery.
It was suggested that on the day of Palme’s assassination he had held a meeting with the Iraqi ambassador to Sweden, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (who found fame during the second Gulf War as Saddam Hussein’s PR man ‘Comical Ali’), at which he had been told vast bribes had been paid to secure the contract, in what became known as the ‘Bofors Scandal’.
The book claimed this led Palme to contact a senior Bofors figure to ask about the allegation, leading in turn to his murder.
But perhaps the most widespread conspiracy theory revolved around South Africa, where the authorities were upset by Palme’s financial and diplomatic support for the anti-apartheid campaign.
AFTER the collapse of apartheid in 1990, a white former security officer, Colonel eugene De Kock, said the South African government had murdered Palme because of his anti- apartheid stance, which had made headlines just a week before the shooting when he had delivered a high-profile speech against segregation. But although Swedish detectives travelled to South Africa in 1996 to research the claim, no arrests were ever made. Which leads us back to Stieg Larsson, the bestselling crime author and journalist who was investigating potential South African links to the crime in the run-up to his own death from a heart attack in 2005. Notes compiled by Larsson claimed the apartheid regime had used a middleman in Cyprus and far-Right activists in Sweden to carry out the murder. After Larsson posthumously achieved fame, his notes were turned into a book called The Man Who Played With fire by fellow journalist and colleague Jan Stocklassa.
At the time of the book’s publication, Stocklassa said: ‘ When I found his archive, I decided to meet these people [those Larsson suspected] and have added quite a lot of information to the puzzle and handed it over to police.’
Yesterday, despite the prosecutor’s announcement, Stocklassa was still insisting that claims engstrom was the murderer were ‘not at all credible’ and he remained ‘completely convinced’ that South Africa was to blame.
engstrom’s ex-wife, whom he divorced in 1999, also insists he is innocent. ‘It is out of the question,’ she said. ‘ He was too much of a coward. He wouldn’t harm a fly.’
So whatever the authorities say, those conspiracy theories may still have some way to run.