Olof Palme is Assassinated
Close to midnight on 28 February 1986, Sven Olof Joachim Palme was walking home from a cinema with his wife, Lisbeth Palme, in the central Stockholm street, Sveavägen, when he was shot in the back at close range. A second shot grazed Lisbeth’s back. Despite being Prime Minister, Palme sought to live as ordinary a life as possible. He would often go out without any bodyguard protection, and the night of his murder was one such occasion. Olof was pronounced dead on arrival at the Sabbatsberg Hospital at 00:06 CET. Lisbet survived without serious injuries.
On 18 March 2020, Swedish investigators met in Pretoria with members of South African intelligence agencies to discuss the case. The South Africans handed over their file from 1986 to their Swedish colleagues. Goran Björkdahl, a Swedish diplomat, had done independent research on Palme’s assassination, leading to South Africa’s apartheid regime. Major General Chris Thirion, who headed the foreign section of Military Intelligence (MI) of South Africa, as the Deputy Chief of Staff Defence Intelligence, during the final years of apartheid rule, had told Björkdahl in 2015 that he believed South Africa was behind Palme’s murder.
On 10 June 2020, Swedish prosecutors stated publicly that they knew who had killed Palme and named Stig Engström, also known as “Skandia Man”, as the assassin. Engström was one of about twenty people who had claimed to witness the assassination and was lat
