Closed and Open Cases: Two Untimely, and Unsolved, European Deaths

At the end, though, the prosecutor said that Swedish law enforcement agencies are now convinced that it was Enstrom, even though, because he is dead, a case cannot be brought against him any more.

But why did Engstrom kill Palme? What was his motive?

Pettersson, the journalist, says: “He wanted attention.”

2. Case Still Open: Uwe Barschel
On 11 October 1987, the fully clothed body of Uwe Barschel was discovered submerged in a bathtub at the 5-star Hotel Beau Rivage in Geneva, Switzerland. Barschel, at the time the 43-year old governor of the state of Schleswig-Holstein on the border of West Germany and Denmark, was a rising star in the conservative Christian Democratic Party.

His meteoric rise hit a bump in the summer of 1987, ahead of the September 1987 election, when he was accused of participating in a smear campaign against Björn Engholm, the Social Democratic candidate for the governorship of Schleswig-Holstein. Barschel vehemently denied the allegations – the CDU still won the election, but with a reduced majority – and his wife told investigators that Barschel flew to Geneva to meet with an informant who promised to give Barschel information about how the Engholm campaign set Barschel up for the fall with false accusations.

Note: Engholm would win the Schleswig-Holstein premiership in 1988, and then became the leader of the Social Democratic Party in 1991. He was forced to resign in 1993 after it was discovered that his 1987 campaign paid DM50,000 to a spy inside the Barschel campaign to gather evidence which would then be included in the false allegations against Barschel, to make them appear more credible.

The Geneva prosecutor determined that Barschel’s death was a suicide, but those who knew him said it made no sense: He had just met with the informant who gave him evidence of the Engholm campaign shenanigans, and he was set to fly back to Germany, with the exonerating evidence, to testify before an investigative committee looking into the allegations against him.  

There were several theories about who might have killed Barschel. The most persistent one involves the Mossad, Israel’s secret service. People who support this theory – some of them credible — note that until 1988 the Ayatollahs regime in Iran, which came to power in 1979, had friendly behind-the-scenes relationship with both Israel and the United States — public rhetoric aside. The United States was shipping arms to Iran from U.S. arms depots in Europe, and these arms were shipped through the port of Kiel in Schleswig-Holstein.

Barschel, who hailed from northern — and more liberal — Schleswig-Holstein was trying to appeal to the more conservative faction of the CDU, a faction which was especially powerful in the southern state of Bavaria. And conservatives in the CDU were critical of arming Iran.

Barschel’s noisy opposition irritated not only the Reagan administration, but also the Israelis, who were more worried about Saddam Hussein’s growing power and were vieweing Iran as the only regional power capable of checking Saddam and his ambitions. Israel thus regarded the blocking or arms sales to Iran as a strategic threat, a threat that had to be dealt with.

The Barschel investigation is almost as old as the Palme investigation, but it is still officially open.

Ben Frankel is the editor of the Homeland Security News Wire