Who Killed Olof Palme? The Unsolved Assassination of Sweden's Prime Minister

Feb 28, 2024

9 min read

Updated: Oct 27

Olof Palme and the spot on Sveavägen in Stockholm where he was assassinated in 1986

Just before half past eleven on a freezing Friday night in February 1986, the prime minister of Sweden was walking home from the cinema with his wife. There were no bodyguards and no police car. Olof Palme had sent his security detail home for the evening, the way he often did.

As the couple crossed a busy street in the middle of Stockholm, a man in a dark coat came up behind them, raised a revolver and shot Palme in the back at point-blank range. He fired a second time, grazing Lisbet Palme, then ran off up a flight of steps and disappeared into the night.

Palme was dead almost before he hit the pavement. Forty years later, nobody has ever been held responsible. The investigation became one of the biggest and most expensive in the world, a national obsession, and a byword for police incompetence. And in December 2025, Swedish prosecutors effectively admitted they're back to square one.

Quick Answers

When was Olof Palme killed? At 11.21pm on Friday 28 February 1986, on Sveavägen in central Stockholm, as he walked home from the cinema with his wife Lisbet.
Why didn't he have bodyguards? Palme often went without protection when he wasn't on official business, and he'd stood his security detail down for the evening.
Was anyone convicted? Christer Pettersson, a petty criminal and alcoholic, was convicted in 1989 after Lisbet Palme picked him out of a line-up, but he was acquitted on appeal the same year.
Who is the main suspect? In 2020 prosecutors named Stig Engström, the so-called Skandia Man, and closed the case. In December 2025 a new chief prosecutor said the evidence against Engström didn't hold up, so officially the killer is unknown.
Was the murder weapon found? No. Palme was shot with a .357 Magnum revolver, and despite decades of searching and tests on several guns, it has never been identified.

Who Was Olof Palme?

Sven Olof Joachim Palme was born in Stockholm on 30 January 1927, into a wealthy, upper-class family. His background was about as establishment as it got, which made his politics all the more striking. After studying in the United States, he joined the Social Democrats, the party that had dominated Swedish politics for decades and built the famous Swedish welfare state.

He rose fast. In 1969 he became party leader and prime minister at just 42. He lost power in 1976, then won it back in 1982, and was in his second spell as prime minister when he was killed.

Palme was a brilliant speaker, sharp, sarcastic and impossible to ignore. On the world stage he picked fights with almost everyone. He was a fierce critic of the Vietnam War, and in December 1972 he compared the American bombing of Hanoi to Nazi atrocities, which so infuriated Washington that it froze diplomatic relations with Sweden. He condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Franco's Spain and the military coup in Chile. And he was one of apartheid South Africa's most outspoken enemies. A week before he died, he told a conference in Stockholm that apartheid couldn't be reformed, only eliminated.

At home, people either loved him or loathed him. To many on the right he was a class traitor, and some fringe groups were convinced he was a Soviet agent. A conservative magazine even sold dartboards with his face on them. Plenty of people wanted Olof Palme gone. It's one reason the list of suspects has never stopped growing.

The Night of 28 February 1986

That Friday was an ordinary evening. Palme and Lisbet decided at short notice to go to the cinema, and met their son Mårten and his girlfriend at the Grand on Sveavägen to watch a Swedish comedy, The Mozart Brothers. Afterwards the couple said goodbye to the others and set off to walk home to their flat in the Old Town.

At 11.21pm, at the corner of Sveavägen and a small side street called Tunnelgatan, the gunman struck. The first bullet hit Palme in the back and he collapsed on the pavement. The second grazed Lisbet. The killer then ran down Tunnelgatan and up the long flight of steps at its end towards Malmskillnadsgatan, and was last seen heading down another street, David Bagares gata.

Flowers and a pool of blood on the pavement on Sveavägen, Stockholm, the morning after Olof Palme was shot — Flowers laid on Sveavägen on 1 March 1986, where Palme was shot the night before

Passers-by rushed to help, and a young couple tried to keep him alive. Palme was taken to Sabbatsberg Hospital, where he was declared dead at six minutes past midnight. It was the first murder of a Swedish leader since 1792, when King Gustav III was shot at a masked ball at the Stockholm opera.

Sweden had no idea how to react. According to Jan Bondeson's book about the murder, the only emergency procedure at the national radio station was a small box marked for the death of the king, containing a tape of solemn music.

A Crime Scene Nobody Protected

If there was ever a chance of catching the killer quickly, it disappeared in the first few hours. The police cordon on Sveavägen was far too small. Mourners walked straight through it to lay roses on the bloodstained pavement, trampling any evidence there might have been. Both bullets were eventually found on the street, but not by the police. They were picked up by members of the public in the days that followed.

Witnesses were allowed to go home without giving statements. There was no proper plan to seal off the city, and trains, ferries and roads out of Stockholm carried on as normal. Even the most senior people weren't there. Hans Holmér, the head of Stockholm's police, was out of town on a skiing trip, and only took charge the next morning.

Black and white photograph of Hans Holmér, the Stockholm police chief who led the early Palme murder investigation — Hans Holmér, who led the investigation in its first year

Holmér had never run a murder investigation in his life. But he looked the part, with a weathered face and a leather jacket, and he quickly became a national celebrity. The press loved him, at least at first.

The Phantom and the First Suspect

One of Holmér's first moves was to publish a sketch of a man seen near the scene, quickly nicknamed the Phantom. It produced a flood of tips, but there was no real evidence the man in the picture was the killer.

Within days, the police had a suspect: Victor Gunnarsson, a 33-year-old right-wing activist who'd been involved with a fringe group that hated Palme. He was questioned, released, picked up again and held in custody, then finally let go on 11 April 1986 when the case against him fell apart. Years later, in 1993, he was found shot dead in the mountains of North Carolina, killed by a former police officer in a case that had nothing to do with Palme. Inevitably, conspiracy theorists didn't believe that for a moment.

The Kurdish Theory

Holmér then became fixated on the idea that the PKK, the Kurdish militant group, was behind the murder. Palme's government had labelled the PKK a terrorist organisation, and Holmér was sure it had taken revenge. There was very little evidence. In January 1987 police carried out a series of raids on Kurds in Sweden, which turned up nothing useful.

Crowds lining the street as Olof Palme's flower-covered coffin is carried through Stockholm in 1986 — Palme's funeral procession through Stockholm in March 1986

When prosecutors refused to go along with any more of it, Holmér stepped down from the investigation in early 1987. An official review later concluded that the first year of the inquiry had been characterised by aimlessness and confusion.

The PKK theory wouldn't die, though. In 1988 it emerged that a publisher and friend of Holmér's named Ebbe Carlsson had been running his own private, illegal investigation into the Kurdish lead, with the secret backing of the justice minister, Anna-Greta Leijon. The scandal forced Leijon to resign.

Christer Pettersson

By the end of 1988 the investigation had a new leader and a new suspect. Christer Pettersson was a small-time criminal, an alcoholic and drug user who'd once killed a man with a bayonet. He was a well-known face around the Sveavägen area, and he didn't have an alibi.

In December 1988 he was arrested, and Lisbet Palme picked him out of a line-up. In July 1989 he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. But the case had serious problems. There was no weapon and no motive, and it came out that Lisbet had been told before the line-up that the suspect was an alcoholic, which made him easy to spot among the other men. Later in 1989 the appeal court acquitted him, and he walked free with compensation from the state.

For the rest of his life, Pettersson played with the media, giving interviews for money, hinting that he might have done it and then denying it. He died in 2004. Many Swedes went on believing he was the killer.

A Nation of Amateur Detectives

As the official investigation stalled, ordinary Swedes started trying to solve it themselves. They became known as privatspanare, private investigators, and some of them spent decades on the case, re-enacting the murder at the scene and building ever more elaborate theories.

Hans Holmér holding up two Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum revolvers at a press conference — Hans Holmér shows reporters the type of revolver police believed was used to kill Palme

The suspects they came up with included the South African security services, the CIA, the KGB, rogue elements of the Swedish police and military, Kurdish militants, Chilean agents and Palme's own family. One theory blamed the film director Andrei Tarkovsky, whose film The Sacrifice happened to include a scene shot near the spot where Palme died. Mårten Palme once told The New York Times that most of the theories were made up by sick people.

The weapon has never turned up either. Investigators were fairly sure it was a .357 Magnum revolver, probably a Smith and Wesson. In 2006 a rusty revolver was pulled out of a lake in Dalarna, and there was talk that it had once been sold to Christer Pettersson, but tests couldn't show whether it had fired the fatal shot.

The South Africa Track

One of the more serious theories points to apartheid South Africa. Palme's government had given large amounts of aid to Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, and the regime had a track record of murdering its opponents abroad. In 1996 Eugene de Kock, a former commander of a South African police death squad, claimed the killing had been ordered by the security services, and named the spy Craig Williamson. A Swedish mercenary, Bertil Wedin, was also named. Both denied any involvement.

Swedish detectives went to South Africa in October 1996 and found nothing to support the claims. But the theory was taken up by the journalist Stieg Larsson, later famous as the author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, who believed South African agents had worked with Swedish right-wing extremists. He was still working on it when he died in 2004.

The Skandia Man

Then, on 10 June 2020, the chief prosecutor, Krister Petersson, called a press conference and named a suspect. He was Stig Engström, a graphic designer who'd worked at the Skandia insurance company, whose offices were right next to the murder scene. Engström had clocked out of the building just before the shooting and had come forward as a witness, claiming he'd tried to help Palme. His story changed repeatedly and didn't match what other witnesses saw.

Engström had military training, belonged to a shooting club, was strongly opposed to Palme's politics and had access to a friend's large gun collection. The journalist Thomas Pettersson had spent years building a case against him. But Engström had killed himself in 2000, so he could never be charged, and there was no gun and no forensic link to the crime. Petersson closed the investigation. By then it had run to something like 250 metres of shelving of files.

Stig Engström, known as the Skandia Man, gesturing outside the Skandia offices on Sveavägen in April 1986 — Stig Engström, the Skandia Man, outside the Skandia building in April 1986

Many people weren't convinced, and in December 2025 the new chief prosecutor, Lennart Guné, agreed with them. He decided not to reopen the investigation, but said the evidence against Engström was full of uncertainties and no longer named him as the killer. The timings didn't really work, he said, there was no explanation of how Engström would have known the Palmes would be there, and nothing to show he'd ever had the right kind of gun. The decision, Guné admitted, didn't bring anyone any closer to solving the case.

Sweden's Lost Innocence

Palme's murder is often described as the moment Sweden lost its innocence. Before 1986 it was a country where the prime minister could walk home from the cinema without protection. Afterwards, it wasn't. That changed again, painfully, in 2003, when the foreign minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death while shopping in a Stockholm department store.

There's a plaque on the pavement on Sveavägen today, at the spot where Palme fell, and the side street where the killer ran is now Olof Palmes gata. Palme himself is buried in the nearby churchyard of Adolf Fredrik, just a short walk away. Lisbet Palme died in 2018, never knowing for certain who killed her husband.

And unless someone, somewhere, finally talks, nobody else is ever likely to know either.