WHO MURDERED Olof Palme?

The assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme over three decades ago still captures the imagination of the world. The reason: Neither before, nor since, has there been a fatal attack upon a Western head of government that has gone unpunished. How is it possible that Palme’s killer was never found?

It is just after 11 P.M. on February 28, 1986, as Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme leaves the cinema with his wife, Lisbet. As he had often done before, he gave his bodyguards the night off. This proves a fatal mistake: A stranger approaches the couple from behind and fires two shots, one of which severs Palme’s spinal cord. He dies immediately, before he even hits the ground. More than 30 years later the official murder investigation remains open.

Palme was known to have many enemies. He’d been a harsh critic of America’s war in Vietnam and of the apartheid regime in South Africa, and with regard to his untimely death an investigator once told a reporter: “You could suspect half the Swedish population.” Swedish police released a composite image of a suspect and received some 8,000 tips as a result, but they led nowhere, and it was not even clear that the man in the image was a real suspect.

Today there is new movement in the case, thanks to a man who has been dead for 16 years now: Stieg Larsson, the best-selling Swedish author who died in 2004. In 2014, Eva Gabrielsson, Stieg’s partner of 32 years, revealed that the couple had spent the better part of a year attempting to identify Palme’s killer. Jan Stocklassa, an erstwhile Swedish diplomat who is also a filmmaker and author, has managed to gain access to Larsson’s files and says the writer had been hot on the heels of the killer. Stocklassa identified the most likely suspect as a man he called “Jacob Thedelin,” who had ties to the South African intelligence service as well as to right-wing radicals in Sweden. In addition, according to Stocklassa, Thedelin had been nearby when the murder occurred and he had no alibi. Stocklassa feels he has gotten very close to unraveling the mystery.

Nonetheless, the authorities may be less interested than Stocklassa in finding the perpetrator. Conspiracy theorists suggest a number of other entities and individuals could have been involved in the murder, with theories ranging from the CIA and KGB to Swedish arms dealers and the Kurdish PKK. If any of these are true, the revelation might embarrass the Swedish government and cause international problems for Sweden. But Palme’s murder had one positive outcome: Security precautions make such an act nearly impossible today.