Sweden's national obsession with the unsolved 1986 murder of its then-prime minister Olof Palme – renewed this week by a revelation that novelist Stieg Larsson helped police with the investigation – has taken yet another twist after it emerged that a key suspect no longer has an alibi for the night in question.
Palme, a populist, leftwing politician whose views made him numerous enemies at home and abroad, was shot in February 1986 as he walked home with his wife from a cinema in Stockholm. Almost 30 years of inquiries has seen the focus fall on everyone from South African agents – Palme was a vocal critic of apartheid – to rogue Swedish spies.
On Tuesday a Swedish newspaper revealed that Larsson – the late author of the hugely successful Millennium trio of crime thrillers, and an expert on far-right groups – left 15 boxes of files connected to his own probe into the case. Larsson passed police the name of Bertil Wedin, a Swede with links to South African security services, as the man who organised the killing. Wedin, now living in northern Cyprus, denies this and police say he is not a suspect.
However, the newspaper given access to Larsson's files, Svenska Dagbladet, reported on Thursday that its own investigations had brought a new lead about another right-wing activist who was an associate of Wedin. Alf Enerström, a doctor and implacable rightwing opponent of Palme who spent time in a psychiatric hospital after shooting a policewoman, was investigated closely by police but always maintained that at the time of the killing he was at home with his then-partner – an account she backed up.
However, when questioned by Svenska Dagbladet, Gio Petre, a former actor who separated from Enerström in the late 1990s, said this wasn't the case. On the night of the murder Enerström in fact left the flat saying he had to put money in a parking meter, Petre said. She told the paper: "I thought it was strange because it was free parking on a Friday night and over the weekend. He came back late."
Asked why she had not said this before, Petre said: "I did not dare. I was scared of Alf, he was violent. You are the first people to ask me about this in a long time."
Enerström was of interest to the police because he was known to be a gun lover and a vehement critic of Palme. According to Svenska Dagbladet he told police he saw Palme as a traitor, saying: "Whoever killed Palme wasn't just doing a service to God, they also did the country a favour."
Petre also told the newspaper she believed her former partner owned a Smith & Wesson revolver at the time, the type of gun police believe was used to shoot Palme.
Enerström, now 83 and no longer under psychiatric care, told the newspaper the allegations were nonsense: "What Gio says about me isn't true. She might well have withdrawn the alibi, but it's what she said before that was true. I never went out alone."
Kerstin Sharp, a Swedish prosecutor who has worked on the case since 1997, said earlier this week that Larsson's tip about Wedin was not part of the police investigation. She declined to comment on the specifics of the new allegations about Enerström but said such information could be useful. "In general terms I can say a changed alibi could be interesting, depending on other circumstances. It may also be that it has very little significance. With guns, we are always interested," she said.
