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Stieg Larsson had papers 'linking Olof Palme murder to South Africa' Stieg Larsson had papers 'linking Olof Palme murder to South Africa'
(about 5 hours later)
Sweden's greatest unsolved murder has taken another twist with revelations that the crime writer Stieg Larsson sent documents to police that he claimed linked Olof Palme's death to South Africa. Peter Walker
The Svenska Dagbladet newspaper reported on Tuesday that Larsson had sent police 15 boxes of papers he said linked the shooting of the Swedish prime minister in 1986 to a former military officer said to have had links with the South African security services. As a campaigning leftwing journalist who penned novels starring a campaigning leftwing journalist, Stieg Larsson's career always blurred fact and fiction to some extent. But now it has emerged that the late best-selling thriller writer was probably also the man who tipped off Swedish police about a suspect in the country's most infamous murder.
The latest report has made headlines across Sweden, where, just as with the assassination of John F Kennedy in the US, Palme's killing has spawned numerous conspiracy theories. Larsson, who died aged 50 in 2004, before his Millennium trilogy of novels had even been published, let alone sold tens of millions of copies and been turned into successful films, left behind 15 boxes of files connected to the killing of Olaf Palme, the Swedish prime minister gunned down as he walked home from a cinema with his wife in February 1986.
Palme, a vocal critic of the apartheid regime in South Africa at the time, was shot as he walked along a street in central Stockholm on 28 February 1986 after going to the cinema with his wife. According to a Swedish newspaper which has been granted access to the papers by Larsson's former partner, Eva Gabrielsson, he identified a Swedish ex-military officer allegedly connected to South Africa's security services as having organised the murder. Palme was a vehement critic of the apartheid government and there has long been speculation about a South African connection.
A petty criminal was found guilty of the crime in 1989 but was released later that year on appeal. Police were widely accused of bungling the investigation. Gabrielsson told Svenska Dagbladet that she and Larsson spent much of the year after Palme's murder looking into who might be to blame, focusing on the far-right groups Larsson had tracked for years. He was interviewed by Swedish police and passed them the name of Bertil Wedin, who moved to northern Cyprus shortly before Palme's death and has remained there since.
The Swede that Larsson claimed killed the prime minister, Bertil Wedin, denied being involved and told Svenska Dagbladet: "I have nothing to lose from the truth being established since I am luckily not the murderer." "The name was written with his typewriter. It is clear it was Stieg who gave this to the Palme investigation," Gabrielsson said. Wedin was never fully interviewed about the affair by police, only talking to detectives once, briefly, on the phone.
Sweden's deputy prosecutor general, Kerstin Skarp, who leads the continuing murder inquiry, told the newspaper that Wedin was "not someone that we are pursuing with any intensity at the moment". It is a compelling story and only slightly undermined by the fact that Larsson probably appears to have been wrong. Wedin himself, now 73, was happily interviewed by Svenska Dagbladet in northern Cyprus and welcomed a new focus on the Palme case. He said: "I have nothing to lose from the truth being established since, fortunately, I am not the murderer."
Wedin is not new to the investigation. His name cropped up in the 1990s amid intense media speculation about a possible South African connection in the case. Swedish police too say Wedin is not a suspect. "I don't want to go into all the lines of inquiry, but Bertil Wedin is not one of the lines we are actively pursuing now," said Kerstin Sharp, a Swedish prosecutor who has worked on the case since 1997.
The killing triggered numerous private investigations, including Larsson's. There have been so many that a word was coined for these civilian sleuths – "privatspanare", or private scouts. The near 30-year-old crime has continued to grip Sweden. A minor criminal was convicted in 1988 but later acquitted on appeal, and the case remains a mystery.
Some claimed to have cracked the case with theories ranging from Palme's death being a carefully enacted suicide to the work of foreign spy agencies. Aside from a South Africa connection, other groups linked to the murder include Yugoslav spies, rogue Swedish security agents and Kurdish independence activists. No fewer than 130 people have confessed to the killing over the decades and the troupes of amateur sleuths even gained their own Swedish slang term, privatspanare, or private scouts.
Private investigators have pointed the finger at an array of people and institutions, from Sweden's security services to Kurdish separatists and the South African and Yugoslav secret police. In 2012 it emerged that Eva Rausing, the wife of the Swedish Tetra Pak heir Hans Kristian Rausing, had told British police she knew the identity of the killer and the location of the murder weapon before her death from a likely drugs overdose.
Palme, the Social Democrat prime minister between 1969 and 1976 and again between 1982 and 1986, was condemned by conservatives in Sweden and overseas for his anti-colonial views and criticism of the US. Some even believed he was a spy for the KGB. But Larsson was more likely than many to have carried out a proper investigation. The magazine he co-founded, Expo, was based on the long-running British anti-extremist publication Searchlight, for which Larsson also wrote. Contacts at Searchlight helped Larsson to connect Wedin to the Palme case and he wrote for the British magazine about the murder, Svenska Dagbladet reported.
Books by Larsson, who died of a heart attack in 2004, have sold more than 75m copies in 50 countries. Leif Persson, an expert on the Palme case who was for 20 years a senior criminologist for the Swedish police and is also an author of crime novels says it is credible that Larsson, an expert on the far-right, first led police to Wedin. "It would not surprise me that Stieg Larsson tipped them off on this. It's consistent with his background," he told Svenska Dagbladet. "But it doesn't solve the Palme murder."
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first in his Millennium trilogy, was made into a Hollywood film with Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara in 2011. Larsson, who died of a heart attack after walking up seven flights of stairs to his office, saw the writing and activism which made him an authority on far-right groups and the recipient of numerous death threats as his main work, not his novels. He nonetheless supposedly maintained high if vague confidence as to the books' eventual success, a sentiment not shared by his friends, some of whom have speculated he must have enlisted help to write them.
Not even Larsson could have predicted the extent of that success, with the adventures of leftwing journalist and partial author alter-ego Mikael Blomkvist and his short-fused computer hacker accomplice Lisbeth Salander translated into dozens of languages and turned into a pair of successful film trilogies, in Swedish and then English.