I am told every person alive in the world remembers when and where they got the news when John F. Kennedy, the President of the United States, was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22nd 1963.
I wasn’t alive then, but I do remember when and where I heard the news that the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme had been killed. It was the first murder of it´s kind in Swedish modern history, of course I remember it still.
Olof Palme (January 30th 1927 – February 28th 1986) was a Swedish politician. Palme was the leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party from 1969 until his assassination in 1986. He was also the Prime Minister of Sweden twice during this period, heading a Privy Council Government from 1969 to 1976 and a cabinet government from 1982 until his death.
A police truth says that a criminal assault by unknown perpetrators must be resolved almost immediately after the crime otherwise it will become very difficult.
The statute of limitations for murder used to be 25 years in Sweden, it was changed due to this botched up investigation so that the search could continue. Christer Pettersson is dead also.
I wasn’t alive then, but I do remember when and where I heard the news that the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme had been killed. It was the first murder of it´s kind in Swedish modern history, of course I remember it still.
A police truth says that a criminal assault by unknown perpetrators must be resolved almost immediately after the crime otherwise it will become very difficult.
Hans Holmer, then head of the Stockholm police, immediately usurped the leadership of the investigation from the prosecutors. This crippled the investigation for more than two years and also to a great extent politicized the investigation. Once the investigation started to seem like a total waste of time it also led to paralyzing fights between Mr. Holmer and the responsible prosecutors.
Mr Holmér had a predetermined idea of where the murder should be found. It had to be a political conspiracy, it just had to be that and most likely – in his mind - there was a Kurdish angle; Palme could never ever have been killed by someone so mundane as a Swedish alcoholic and drug abuser.
While Holmér directed the searchlights towards the Kurdish PKK it delayed the examination of those who moved around the murder scene at the time of the killing.
The investigators last real chance to get someone convicted for the Palme murder came in the trials of Christer Pettersson. The evidence was totally spoiled by a witness confrontation where the only good eyewitness the widow Mrs. Lisbet Palme in advance was told – quite possibly by Hans Holmér himself he always was good at chatting - that the suspect was an alcoholic. That led to her pointing out Pettersson as the man that killed her husband saying "Well, it is easy to see who is the alcoholic." This of course brought her testimony into doubt, no matter how she tried to repair the damage afterwards.
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The statute of limitations for murder used to be 25 years in Sweden, it was changed due to this botched up investigation so that the search could continue. Christer Pettersson is dead also.
Now I don´t believe that anyone will ever be tried and convicted for Palme´s murder.
Oh where and when I heard the news? It was when my mother woke me up on Saturday morning March 1, saying "Its time to get up, (Bock). Palme was killed last night." She sounded afraid and I saw tears in her eyes, even my father seemed very worried.
We lost a bit of our innocence that night, all Swedes living at that time did.
We lost a bit of our innocence that night, all Swedes living at that time did.
