40-year mystery: Who killed Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme?

2026-03-09 23:12:41Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
40-year mystery: Who killed Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme?
Olof Palme

At 11:21 p.m. on the evening of February 28, 1986, Sweden changed forever. Prime Minister Olof Palme was executed with a Magnum 357 pistol bullet in central Stockholm as he returned from the cinema with his wife, unaccompanied.

Four decades later, this event still remains enigmatic, with every attempt to uncover the killer having failed spectacularly.

And this has its origins in poorly conducted initial investigations.

About 10,000 people have been questioned for this serious crime, 134 false confessions have been examined, and a documentation covering 250 meters of shelves has been compiled, but the result is zero.

Conspiracy theories have accused everyone from the CIA and the Kurdish PKK to South African secret services and right-wing extremists. The only person arrested, Christer Pettersson, was later released for lack of evidence.

In June 2020, the Attorney General identified Stig Engström as the perpetrator of the murder and closed the case on the grounds that he had died in 2000. Engström, who was a witness at the scene, had become the subject of documentaries and series on Netflix.

However, this lead was not convincing either. In December last year, the prosecutor's office rejected that version, acquitting Engström due to insufficient evidence.

The murder remains an open wound for Swedish society. Recently, a protest in Stockholm called for the creation of a truth commission with access to the secret archives of SAPO (Swedish intelligence). Journalist Per Janse says that after spending a billion kronor, Sweden is back to square one.

The last hope now is Artificial Intelligence. The Spår podcast has started using an AI engine to analyze 30,000 documents in less than a second, a task that would take the police ten years.

However, experts like Gunnar Wall warn that no technology can find information that does not exist. Gaps in the files and the lack of material evidence continue to keep this crime as one of the greatest mysteries of modern history.


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