SA link to Swedish PM's assassination ruled out

Swedish authorities say there is not enough evidence linking SA’s apartheid security forces to the 1986 assassination of its Prime Minister Olof Palme. According to a News24 report, Swedish chief prosecutor Krister Petersson and Swedish police lead investigator Hans Melander, held a media briefing last week announcing the closure of the 34-year-old investigation. They revealed graphic designer Stig Engström was the man believed to be behind the assassination of the Prime Minister, but were unable to pursue prosecution as Engström is dead. Petersson described this as the country’s largest investigation, which saw the investigation team interviewing 10 000 people and had 1 034 others confessing to the crime. He said numerous leads were followed, including those involving the Kurdish militant group the PKK, the police and SA’s security forces. For several years, it was believed SA held the answers to Palme's assassination, with ‘deep-search’ documents allegedly describing Palme as an ‘enemy of the state’ by the apartheid regime, along with a list of names of people believed to have been involved in the decision, planning and implementation of his assassination. Palme's murder took place a week after he met with the ANC’s long-serving president OR Tambo in Stockholm.

Full Fin24 report

It was reported this week that senior SA State Security Agency officials met Swedish authorities in March in Pretoria at the Department of International Relations & Co-operation where they received a dossier said to contain information on the killing. A TimesLIVE report notes that according to the UK newspaper, The Guardian, which quoted an unnamed SA intelligence source, the meeting was requested by Swedish authorities. The Swedish police’s Palme investigation head, Hans Melander, said the link had been interesting because of several specific motives. ‘The problem is that you cannot get specific information. SA has been discussed extensively. A number of people gave our investigators interesting views, but unfortunately there was not enough specific information to do something about this lead.’

– TimesLIVE

The Swedish decision is unlikely to put an end to the speculation about a South African connection since there are so many unanswered questions and so many loose ends. According to an analysis by Terry Bell on the Daily Maverick site, SA lies at the centre of many unanswered questions. He notes Palme and his ‘kitchen Cabinet’ of close friends, including Lars Gunner Eriksson, of the International University Exchange Fund in Switzerland, were deeply involved in trying to establish, with Tambo, a ‘third way’ anti-apartheid force. This would have made it impossible for the Pretoria Government and its Western allies to portray the ANC as being dominated by the SA Communist Party and, therefore, Moscow. As such, Palme was a particular target for Pretoria.

Full analysis on the Daily Maverick site