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Episode 158: The Assassination of Olof Palme — Sweden's Unsolved Political Murder
Shortly before midnight on 28 February 1986, Olof Palme, the Prime Minister of Sweden, was shot dead on a Stockholm street as he and his wife Lisbet walked home from the cinema. A single bullet struck him in the back. A second shot wounded Lisbet but she survived. The gunman disappeared into the night. Sweden, a country unaccustomed to political violence, was thrown into a crisis that reverberates to this day. The investigation that followed became one of the longest, most troubled, and ultimately most inconclusive in the history of European criminal justice.
Palme was a figure of considerable international significance. He was an outspoken critic of American foreign policy in Vietnam, a supporter of independence movements in the developing world, and a mediator in the Iran-Iraq War. He had enemies across a wide political spectrum: the South African apartheid regime, elements of the American intelligence community, far-right Swedish groups, Kurdish political factions, and various actors in the arms trade. Sweden's Social Democratic government had also been involved in highly contentious arms exports, and Palme was himself a controversial figure within Swedish political culture, beloved by the left and despised by sections of the right.
The investigation was chaotic from the outset. The crime scene was not adequately preserved. Witnesses gave conflicting accounts. A massive and disorganised police effort generated hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation without producing a credible suspect. In 1988, a petty criminal named Christer Pettersson was convicted of the murder based partly on an identification by Lisbet Palme, but was acquitted on appeal the following year due to insufficient evidence. The case remained officially open for thirty-four years.
In June 2020, Swedish prosecutors announced that the primary suspect was Stig Engström, a graphic designer who had been present near the scene and whose behaviour in the aftermath was, according to investigators, suspicious and inconsistent. Engström had died in 2000, making prosecution impossible, and the case was formally closed without a conviction. Many experts and commentators expressed scepticism about this conclusion.
The theories about who ordered Palme's murder — if it was indeed ordered rather than the act of a disturbed individual — have included the CIA, South African intelligence, Kurdish militants, and elements of the Swedish police or security services. None has been conclusively established.
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