Mordet på Olof Palme - 28 februari 1986

By late Saturday, police said they had interviewed about 10 people who were on or near Sveagagen, the busy thoroughfare where Palme was assassinated late Friday night.

A senior police official said: “The descriptions we have (of the killer) are vague; there isn’t much to go on.”

Authorities were unable even to suggest a motive for the killing. Palme, 59, was shot at close range as he walked from a movie with his wife, Lisbeth. The killing was the first political assassination in modern Swedish history, and in this country, which has seen little of the political violence that has become commonplace in other parts of the world, the murder has been met by stunned disbelief as well as by a national outpouring of grief.

ADVERTISEMENT
sh ‘Never . . . in This Country’

King Carl XVI Gustav said: “I never thought that this kind of event would happen in this country.”

On Saturday, Palme’s 51-year-old deputy, Ingvar Carlsson, was named acting prime minister at an emergency meeting of the Cabinet. He also won the endorsement of the Social Democratic Party’s executive committee Saturday to assume the role of party chairman, a move that is expected to assure his being chosen as Palme’s full successor shortly after Parliament reconvenes from a winter recess March 10.

In the first daylight hours after Palme’s death, the country focused its attention on the search for the assassin. Accounts surrounding the killing varied widely. Through much of the day, police reported that Palme’s wife had recognized the assassin as someone she had seen before, but did not know who he was.

However, in an interview late Saturday, Lisbeth Palme, 55, was quoted as denying that she had seen her husband’s killer.

Order of Events Unclear

Some witnesses to the slaying said that Palme’s assassin engaged him briefly in conversation before shooting him. Others said that the assailant began firing as soon as he reached the prime minister. A single 9-millimeter bullet was found near the scene.

Security at airports and all border crossings was tightened as police searched for the assassin, described by witnesses as a dark-haired man between 30 and 45 years old and of average build. One witness described him as about 6 feet tall and wearing a blue ski jacket, dark trousers and a cap.

Although insisting that they were taking every clue or tip seriously, senior police officials appeared to play down reports that the killing was the work of an organized political group.

“There is nothing at this point to indicate political motives or that any political organization was behind this act,” Stockholm Police Chief Sune Sandstrom said at a news conference.

One report early Saturday, carried by the Swedish domestic news agency, TT, quoted police sources as saying that they were investigating Ustachi, a Croatian separatist movement with fascist sentiments, in connection with the assassination.

Many brought clutches of flowers, which were collected by police at the barricades and taken to the spot where Palme died. By early afternoon, the sidewalk was covered with the public offerings. Nearby was a sign, asking the question, “Why does anyone murder a true democrat?”

So far, there has been no announcement of a date for Palme’s funeral, although a senior Social Democratic Party official indicated that it could be as late as March 15. “We have not been able to have much contact with the family on this matter so far today,” the official said. “We expect there will be an announcement (Sunday).”

Palme is regarded here as Sweden’s best-known prime minister internationally in this century--a global statesman, probably second among Swedes only to Dag Hammarskjold, the late U.N. Secretary General, who died in a plane crash in 1961 while on a peace mission to the Congo.

For much of his prime ministership, Palme had a foreign minister but conducted foreign policy in a personal, and often controversial, manner. More often than not, this policy gave a distinctly anti-American spin to Sweden’s neutrality.

In 1968, while he was still education minister, Palme gained international recognition by joining a senior North Vietnamese official in an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Stockholm.

Tilted Neutrality?

During his first period as prime minister, Sweden became a haven for American draft evaders, and more recently, Palme seemed able to overlook the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Yet, he visited Nicaragua and condemned U.S. Central American policy.

In his later years, however, many political observers here felt that the anti-American tilt that won him domestic support during the Vietnam era had lost domestic support. The Swedish people seemed more concerned about the incursions of Soviet nuclear submarines into their territorial waters than potential U.S. threats in far-off places.

After a speech on May Day, 1984, in which he devoted 51 lines to criticizing U.S. Central American policy and only one line to the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, a leading independent Stockholm newspaper commented that the speech did not reflect the popular Swedish view of neutrality.

Because of Palme’s domination of Sweden’s foreign affairs, little is known about the views of his apparent successor, Carlsson, except that the two worked together since the late 1950s in the Social Democratic Party and, according the the party’s spokesman, Leif Gustafson, share common views.

But Carlsson’s experience has been almost exclusively on domestic issues.