Olof Palme's 1986 murder is officially unsolved again

Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was shot dead on Stockholm’s Sveavägen late on 28 February 1986, and almost four decades later his killer is officially unknown: in December 2025 prosecutors withdrew their 2020 naming of a suspect.

Palme, 59, was walking home from a cinema with his wife, Lisbeth, who was grazed by a second shot. He had dismissed his security guards earlier that day, and the investigation was later criticised for failing to seal off the crime scene. The inquiry that followed logged some 10,000 interviews and 134 confessions; 738 weapons were tested, and the gun was never found.

• 1988: Christer Pettersson, a man with a manslaughter conviction, was charged after Lisbeth Palme identified him in a police line-up.
• 1989: A Stockholm court convicted him and sentenced him to life, but only because its six lay judges outvoted the two professional judges, who favoured acquittal. Three months later an appeal court freed him, finding the evidence inadequate.
• 2020: On 10 June chief prosecutor Krister Petersson named Stig Engström, the “Skandia Man”, a graphic designer who had presented himself to police as a witness. Engström had died in 2000, so the case was closed on the ground that the suspect was dead.
• 2025: After a September request to test Palme’s coat with new DNA techniques, Director of Prosecution Lennart Guné reviewed the case and ruled on 18 December that the evidence against Engström was not sufficient to identify him as the killer.

The closure stands, but its legal basis has changed. Guné declined to reopen the inquiry, judging that further investigation, including the requested DNA work, was unlikely to change the evidence decisively. In 2020 the case was closed because the suspect was dead; the official position is now that, on the material available, it is not possible to prove who killed Palme.

Many summaries still describe the case as solved in 2020. Sweden’s prosecutors no longer do.