Quick Takes // By Ben FrankelClosed and Open Cases: Two Untimely, and Unsolved, European Deaths

The untimely death more than thirty years ago of two leading European politicians still haunts the continent. The killing of Sweden’s prime minister Olof Palme in February 1986, and the mysterious death of Uwe Barschel, the rising German politician, in October 1987, occurred within a year-and-half of each other. Both cases have remained unsolved to this day. On Wednesday, Swedish prosecutors announced that they were closing the Palme case. The Barschel case is still officially open.

1. Closed Cases: Olof Palme
On 26 February 1986, Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, 59, was killed on a central Stockholm street, the first political killing in Sweden since King Gustav III was assassinated in 1792. Palme was walking home with his wife after watching a movie in a downtown movie theater. As was then the way they did things in Sweden, he had no bodyguards. His wife, Lisbeth, was also shot, but she was only lightly injured.

On Wednesday, Swedish prosecutors announced that they were closing the investigation after thirty-four years. Krister Petersson, the lead prosecutor, said that there was “reasonable evidence” that the assassin was Stig Engstrom, a graphic designer at a Stockholm insurance company. The police were gathering evidence against him when he committed suicide in 2000, at the age of 66.

Over the years, the police pursued thousands of leads in a case that Peterson compared to the JFK assassination. The examination of Engstrom and his possible connection to the assassination continued after he killed himself, and the investigation was helped by a thorough journalistic investigation by Thomas Petterson (no relation of the prosecutor) who, in 2017, was able to show links between the killer and a weapons collector, a former military man who hated Palme and his socialist policies.

The weapon which likely was used in the killing was found at the collector’s home.

As was the case with the Kennedy assassination, there were dozens of conspiracy theories which mushroomed in the wake of Palme’s killing. Because Palme’s was actively involved in trying to promote democracy in various hotspots, most of the theories involve foreign actors: South Africa (Palme was a leading anti-apartheid crusader); Chile (he led the opposition to Gen, Augusto Pinochet); the Kurdish PKK (because Palme, in his effort to mediate between Turkey and the Kurds, supported a more moderate Kurdish faction); the CIA (Palme was a leading voice against the Vietnam War); and many more.