by Ray Black
Another factor in the murder was the relaxed Scandinavian attitude to security for politicians. In spite of his position, Olof Palme was often to be seen walking about in Stockholm without any kind of bodyguard or other protection, and the night of his murder was one such occasion. Near to midnight on February 28, 1986, he was walking home from the cinema with his wife Lisbet along the central Stockholm street called Sveavägen, when the couple were attacked without warning by a lone gunman. Olof Palme was shot in the back at close range and a second shot wounded Lisbet Palme. Police said a taxi-driver used his mobile radio to raise the alarm. Two young women sitting in a car nearby tried to help the Prime Minister. He was rushed to hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival, just after midnight. Mrs Palme was treated for her injury and she recovered.
Deputy Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson immediately assumed Palme’s duties as prime minister and leader of the Social Democratic Party.
The assassin escaped unobserved and vanished. A reward equivalent to five million US dollars was offered for information leading to the conviction of the killer, a reward that was to go uncollected. The revolver used in the murder was never found. The assassination remains an unsolved crime, though many different theories have been put forward. One is that right-wing extremists were behind it. A right-winger called Victor Gunnarsson, with connections to various right-wing extremist groups including the European Workers Party, was arrested straight after the murder but soon released after a dispute between the police and prosecuting attorneys. John Stannerman was another of the police’s suspects, but he turned out to have a watertight alibi: he was locked up in prison on the night Palme was shot.
Viktor Gunnarsson, a thirty-three-year-old Swede and fanatical anti-Communist, looked a much likelier suspect. He was a compulsive liar and role-player. He had spent some time in America and claimed to have contacts with the CIA. Gunnarsson was arrested twice and Inspector Wingren, who was responsible for that part of the investigation, was convinced that he was the killer. Gunnarsson was nevertheless released after an intervention by senior police officers, and he left Sweden. In 1994, a short time after revealing that he was the one described as the killer in Inspector Wingren´s book He killed Olof Palme, he was murdered in North Carolina. The motive for his murder remained a mystery to the American police. Gunnarsson had uttered threats against Palme. He was definitely seen by witnesses near the murder scene both before and after killing, and a man of his description was seen running away after the fatal shots. Unlike Stannerman, he had no alibi.
Over a year after the assassination, another suspect, Christer Pettersson, was arrested. He was picked out by Mrs Palme at an identification parade, and consequently tried and convicted of the murder. Later, on appeal to the High Court, Pettersson succeeded in gaining an acquittal; the murder weapon had never been found; there were doubts about the reliability of Mrs Palme’s evidence; and Pettersson had no obvious motive. In the 1990s new evidence against Pettersson emerged, mostly from petty criminals who had changed their stories but also, startlingly, from a confession by Pettersson. The chief prosecutor, Agneta Blidberg, considered re-opening the case, but acknowledged that a confession alone would not be sufficient, saying rather oddly: ‘He must say something about the weapon because the appeals court set that condition in its ruling. That is the only technical evidence that could be cited as a reason to re-open the case.’
The legal case against Christer Pettersson therefore remains closed, but the police file on the investigation into the Palme murder cannot be closed until both murder weapon and murderer are found. Christer Pettersson died in September 2004 of a cerebral haemorrhage after injuring his head. A recent Swedish television documentary investigating the murder claimed that Pettersson’s associates had said that he confessed to them his role in the murder, but that it was a case of mistaken identity. Pettersson had intended to kill another man, a drug dealer who often walked, similarly dressed, along the same street at night. He had not intended to kill the prime minister. The television programme also said there had been police surveillance of drug activity in the area, with several officers on duty in apartments and cars near the scene of the shooting, but the police monitoring had ceased forty-five minutes before the murder.
Over thirty witnesses saw people, some identifiable as policemen, talking into walkie-talkies along the Palmes’ route home from the cinema or along the killer’s escape route leading up to the time of the murder. One interpretation is that Mr and Mrs Palme were being kept under observation for benevolent reasons; another is that they were being stalked as part of a malevolent conspiracy, an elaborate plot to assassinate Palme; another is that there was a police surveillance operation going on in the area that had nothing to do with the Palmes or the attack on them.
As a result of the documentary, the Swedish police decided to open an investigation into Pettersson’s role in the Palme case. Then there were newspaper articles alleging that the film-maker had invented some of the material and left out contradictory evidence.
There was, alternatively, a possible South African connection. A week before he was murdered, Palme addressed the Swedish People’s Parliament Against Apartheid in Stockholm, which was attended by hundreds of anti-apartheid sympathisers as well as leaders and officials from the ANC. In 1996, Colonel Eugene de Kock, a former South African police officer, gave evidence to the Supreme Court in Pretoria alleging that Palme had been shot and killed because he ‘strongly opposed the apartheid regime and Sweden made substantial contributions to the ANC’. De Kock knew the person responsible for the murder of Olof Palme; he said it was Craig Williamson, a South African super-spy working for BOSS and who was in Stockholm during the days immediately before and after the murder. Brigadier Johannes Coetzee, who had been Williamson’s boss, identified Anthony White as the assassin. Then it became more complicated still; Peter Caselton, a member of Coetzee’s assassination squad, named a Swede living in Northern Cyprus since 1985 as the assassin; his name was Bertil Wedin. In October 1996, Swedish police investigators went to South Africa but were unable to substantiate any of de Kock’s claims for a South African Operation Longreach.
There had certainly been a conspiracy to assassinate. In 1999, Coetzee, Williamson, de Kock and Caselton were to be granted amnesties by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission for their involvement in the bombing of the ANC offices in London in 1982. As it happened no-one was killed, but Oliver Tambo, who was supposed to have attended a meeting there at the time of the bombing, was their probable target. But the reality of a South African conspiracy to assassinate Oliver Tambo – if that is what it was – is no proof whatever of a South African conspiracy to assassinate Olof Palme.
Another possibility was that Kurds were behind the murder. The Stockholm police commissioner, Hans Holmér, arrested a number of Kurds living in Sweden, following allegations that one of their organisations was responsible for the murder. The lead led nowhere except to Holmér’s removal from the investigation. Fifteen years later, in 2001, Swedish police officers interviewed the Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Öcalan in a Turkish prison about his allegations that a dissident Kurdish group murdered Palme. But this lead also proved fruitless.
The Swedish police investigation was overall poorly organised, with bureaucrats and administrators making the key decisions rather than experienced police officers; meanwhile Sweden’s most experienced murder investigators were left out or were brought into the investigation too late. Lisbeth Palme was only questioned by certain selected investigators and although she positively identified Pettersson at an identification parade she was apparently never called upon to identify Gunnarsson, the other prime suspect. Many police officers were shocked at the ineptitude with which the Palme case was handled. The investigation inspired a certain amount of black humour; ‘The bad news is that the police are after us: the good news is that it’s the Swedish police’. The implication was that there was no need to fear an early arrest.
Theories about
the unsolved murder of Olof Palme abound. Several of the theories link Palme’s death to arms trading. One suggestion is that Palme built on his friendship with Rajiv Gandhi to secure Bofors, a Swedish armaments company, a deal to supply the Indian Army with howitzers. However, Palme did not realize that Bofors had used a company based in England to influence Indian government officials in concluding the deal. Bondeson alleged that on the morning he was assassinated Palme had met the Iraqi ambassador to Sweden, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf. They discussed Bofors, which Muhammed Saeed al-Sahhaf knew well because of its arms sales during the Iran-Iraq War. The ambassador apparently told Palme all about Bofors’ activities behind the scenes. Palme was furious. Palme’s murder could have been triggered by this conversation, if either Bofors arms dealers or their middlemen had a prearranged plan to silence the prime minister if he should ever discover the truth and endanger the deal with India. Like many conspiracy theories, it makes a fascinating and compelling story but is ultimately unconvincing.
Another possibility is that the Red Army Faction of Germany assassinated Palme. Indeed it seems the Red Army Faction went so far as to claim responsibility for the murder by way of an anonymous phone call to a London news agency. They supposedly assassinated him because he was the prime minister of Sweden during the 1975 occupation of the West German embassy in Stockholm which ended in failure for the Red Army Faction.
The Olof Palme mystery may never be solved. It remains a possibility that more than one of the leads we have looked it is true. Perhaps BOSS (to take one example) was behind the assassination, and perhaps one of the ‘lone gunmen’ was hired to do the job – and take all the blame. But so much disinformation has been spread about that it is very difficult to get at the truth of what happened that night on an ordinary street corner in Stockholm, when a Prime Minister was shot and, incredibly, no-one was ever brought to justice for it.
John F. Kennedy
The assassination of John F. Kennedy is probably the most controversial case in the modern history of the United States. The question has frequently been asked – did Lee Harvey Oswald kill Kennedy by himself, or was he part of a larger conspiracy? There is no doubt that there were all the right ingredients for a conspiracy. It is strange that Kennedy was assassinated in front of thousands of people and while being filmed, yet the superfluity of witness evidence, from eye to lens, served only confuse matters enormously. Even the analysis of film footage was open to interpretation so that the result was a plethora of conflicting opinions that managed to muddy investigations.
Of Irish descent, John F. Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on May 29, 1917. He graduated from Harvard in 1940 and went straight into the navy. He was renowned for his bravery when, in 1943, his boat was sunk by a Japanese destroyer. Despite being seriously wounded, Kennedy led the survivors through dangerous waters to safety.
After the war Kennedy became a Democratic Congressman, advancing in 1953 to the Senate. In September 1953, he married Jacqueline Bovier and two years later wrote Profiles in Courage, while convalescing following an operation on his back. For this book he won the Pulitzer Prize in history.
Kennedy became the 35th President of the United States in 1960, the youngest man ever elected to this role. Major events during his presidency include the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the building of the Berlin Wall, the Space Race, the American Civil Rights Movement and early events of the Vietnam War. However, above all Kennedy had a vision for the United States: ‘a world of law and free choice, banishing the world of war and coercion’. His administration saw the start of new hope for both equality for Americans and the peace of the new world, but this was to be shortlived as his reign was truncated by an assassin’s bullet.
Kennedy chose to visit Dallas in November 1963 for three main reasons: to help raise funds for the Democratic Party campaign, to begin his quest for re-election and to mend political boundaries (the Democrats had previously lost Dallas in 1960). Following a meeting with Vice President Johnson and Governor Connally on June 5, 1963, it was announced that Kennedy would definitely visit Dallas despite early concerns about security. Adlai Stevenson, the US Ambassador to the United Nations had recently been heckled and struck by a protest sign on a recent visit.
The police were nervous and they prepared exceptionally stringent security precautions so that the demonstrations marking the Stevenson visit would not be repeated. However, for some reason Winston Lawson of the Secret Service, told the Dallas police not to assign the usual number of experienced homicide detectives to follow the president’s car. This was standard protection for any visiting dignitary and had they been in place they could possibly have prevented the shooting. However, that is all hearsay.
The planned route for the motorcade was from Love Field airport, through downtown Dallas to end at the Dallas Trade Mart where Kennedy was to speak. The car to be used was an open-top, 1961 Lincoln Continental – no car with a bulletproof top was yet in service.
Dallas newspapers printed details and a map of the intended route, so anyone could have got hold of this information. Just before 12.30 p.m. Kennedy’s car entered Dealey Plaza and then turned left directly in front of the Texas School Book Depository. As the presidential car passed the Depository and travelled down Elm Street, witnesses recall hearing three shots. There was little reaction as most people in the crowd thought it was simply an exhaust backfiring.
As Kennedy smiled and waved at the crowds to his right side, a shot entered his upper back, penetrated his neck and came out via his throat. His hands went to his neck and he leaned forward, while Jacqueline Kennedy put her arms around him, unsure of what had happened. Texas Governor John Connally, who was sitting in the front of the car with his wife, was also hit by one of the bullets and he yelled, ‘Oh, no, no, no’. The first shot hit the governor in the back and the second in the chest, at which time he said, ‘My God, they are going to kill us all’. The last shot hit its target as the car passed in front of the John Neely Bryan north pergola concrete structure. As the sound of the shot was heard, a hole the size of a grapefruit appeared on the right side of Kennedy’s head, covering the inside of the car and a nearby motorcycle officer with blood. Of course anyone that can add up would make this four shots, but the consensus of opinion is that the first bullet left Kennedy’s body and went on to hit Connally in the back.
Clint Hill, who was a secret service agent riding on the left front running board of the car following the president’s limousine, jumped off as soon as he heard the shots and ran ahead. He climbed onto the rear of the president’s car, pushed Mrs Kennedy down in her seat and then clung to the car as it sped off towards Parkland Memorial Hospital. Governor Connally, although seriously wounded, survived the ordeal, thanks to the quick reactions of his wife who pulled him down onto her lap, thus closing his wound. John Kennedy was not so lucky.
When the shots were fired the cars had been passing a grassy mound to the north side of Elm Street, but when the police ran to the area with its high picket fence, there was no evidence of a sniper. However, Lee Bowers, a railway signalman who sat in a two-storey tower, had an unobstructed view of the mound and the rear of the picket fence. He said he saw a total of four men in the area at the time of the shooting.
Meanwhile, another witness, Howard Brennan, told the police that as he watched the motorcade go by he heard a shot coming from above and, when he looked up, he saw a man with a rifle make another shot from a corner window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Despository. He managed to give a description of the sniper, which was broadcast to all the Dallas police. Other witnesses came forward and said they had heard shots coming from the direction of the Depository.
The Depository reported that one of their employees, Lee Harvey Oswald, had gone missing. Oswald was arrested just one hour and twenty minutes after the assassination, when he killed a Dallas policeman, J. D. Tippit, who had seen Oswald walking down a side road. Later that night he was charged with the murder of Kennedy a
nd Tippit, although he adamantly denied shooting anyone. Oswald never made it to court, just two days later while being escorted to an armoured car on way to the Dallas County Jail, he was shot dead by Jack Ruby.
Jack Ruby lived in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas and shot Oswald in the stomach in the basement of Dallas police station. Ruby walked down a car ramp to get to the basement, managing to get past a police officer who was guarding the exit. Ruby was brought to trial and convicted to death. In 1966, the decision was reversed and he was granted a second trial. However, before his case could be heard he died from lung cancer, with Ruby claiming on his deathbed that someone had injected him with the disease. He has been described as a very volatile, very emotional, unbalanced person who thought he was doing the right thing when he shot Oswald. This of course did not stop people saying that he was just a small fry in a much larger conspiracy. In fact it later transpired that Ruby was a well connected businessman with friends in both the police force and the underworld. That led people to begin wondering about Ruby’s true motive.
A 6.5 x 52mm Italian Mannlicher-Carcano M91/38 bolt-action rifle was found on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository and it was later identified as the weapon used in the assassination. It was also confirmed that the rifle had been bought the previous March by Lee Harvey Oswald under the assumed name ‘A. Hiddell’. A partial palm print of Oswald was also found on the barrel of the gun.