Building collapse death toll rises Swedish PM’s assassin named

PAKISTANI rescuers have recovered nine more bodies from beneath the rubble of a building that collapsed earlier this week in Karachi, bringing the death toll to 22, officials said yesterday. There are fears there may be more bodies.

The building collapsed on Sunday and it was unclear how many people were inside at the time. It had 40 flats and most were empty because it was recently ordered vacated after it was declared unsafe in March, when cracks emerged in the roofs and walls.

Rescue workers used heavy machinery and were still removing the rubble, searching for more victims, according to police and the Edhi Foundation, which runs Pakistan’s largest private ambulance service. The earlier reported death toll had stood at 13.

Altaf Hussain, a senior police official, said the building collapsed after some of its residents went back inside to try to retrieve belongings. | AP

A GRAPHIC designer was the man who shot dead Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986, a prosecutor said yesterday, announcing that a case that had haunted the country for decades was now closed.

Palme, who led Sweden’s Social Democrats for decades and served two periods as prime minister, was one of the architects of Scandinavia’s model of a strong welfare state, and a fierce Cold War-era critic.

He was shot dead in central Stockholm in 1986 after a visit to the cinema with his wife and son.

Several witnesses glimpsed an assailant clad in a dark jacket or coat who fled the scene. The murder weapon was not recovered.

A suspect with links to right-wing groups was taken into custody 17 days after the murder but was released.

The lead investigator resigned after no evidence was found in a 1987 raid on a bookshop linked to the Kurdish separatist group PKK.

Christer Pettersson, who had a previous murder conviction, was convicted of the crime in 1989 but freed by a higher court amid doubts over the identification process.

Since his acquittal, no suspects have been arrested and the unsolved murder has frustrated four lead investigators.

Swedish police visited South Africa in 1996 after a former police commander there alleged the murder had been directed by apartheid-era security forces.

Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson was working on a theory connected to the South African security apparatus until his death in 2004.

Other theories have fingered diverse groups ranging from rightwing elements in Sweden’s police to Croatian separatists.

Prosecutor Krister Petersson, who has led an investigation into the case since 2017, said the killer was Stig Engstrom, a suspect long known to Swedes as “Skandia man” after the company where he worked, which had offices near the scene of the shooting.

“Because the person is dead, I cannot bring charges against him and have decided to close the investigation,” Petersson said.

Yesterday’s naming of the killer as a lone gunman with no public political profile is unlikely to put to rest the conspiracy theories that have surrounded the assassination.

The prosecutor did not announce any major investigative breakthroughs that had helped solve the crime, and said the technical evidence was not new.

Engstrom was repeatedly questioned by police, but dismissed relatively quickly as a suspect.

Petersson said several witness accounts of the probable killer were in line with Engstrom’s appearance, while witnesses also contradicted his account of his movements at the scene.

Members of Engstrom’s family have repeatedly dismissed accusations that he was the killer. The Daily Expressen quoted his ex-wife as saying that he was too timid to have carried out the murder.

The paper quoted a childhood friend as saying Engstrom was “the most normal person in the world”.While a petty criminal was convicted of Palme’s killing decades ago, that judgment was later overturned. The subsequent failure of police to identify the culprit has left a scar on the psyche of a country that still prides itself on how safe it is to walk its streets.

Palme was prime minister between 1969 and 1976 and between 1982 and 1986. Some hail him as the architect of modern Sweden, while conservatives denounced his anti-colonialist views and criticism of the US. | Reuters