At 11:21 p.m. on Friday, February 28, 1986, the Prime Minister of Sweden, Olof Palme, was shot in the back at point-blank range on Sveavägen, Stockholm, while walking home from a cinema with his wife Lisbet. Lisbet Palme was grazed by a second shot. Olof Palme was 59 years old. He had been the Prime Minister of Sweden from 1969 to 1976 and again from 1982. He had no bodyguards that night. The killer ran east up Tunnelgatan and disappeared. He has never been positively identified. Sweden's Palme Commission and its successor police investigation ran for 34 years. On June 10, 2020, Chief Prosecutor Krister Petersson publicly named the most likely perpetrator — a Swedish graphic designer named Stig Engström, the so-called "Skandiamannen" — and simultaneously closed the case because Engström had died in 2000 and could not be tried. The 40-year-old investigation produced 22 binders of investigative material, dozens of failed theories, one wrongful conviction, and no court ruling. It is the largest unsolved political assassination in modern European history.
Assassinations & Disappearances
1986
