Swedish PM Olof Palme is shot dead in Stockholm
On this day · 28 February 1986
A prime minister walking home from the cinema without bodyguards was gunned down, launching a case that baffled Sweden for decades.
Late on 28 February 1986, Sweden’s prime minister Olof Palme was shot in the back at point-blank range as he walked home from a cinema with his wife, Lisbeth, along the central Stockholm street Sveavägen. A second shot grazed Lisbeth. The couple, famously informal, had no bodyguards with them.
Palme, 59, was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at hospital. The killing of a sitting head of government in a country that prided itself on openness was a national trauma — and the start of one of modern Europe’s most tangled murder investigations.
By the time prosecutors named a likely suspect, the inquiry had run 34 years, logged some 10,000 interviews, and collected more than 130 confessions.
A man named Christer Pettersson was convicted in 1988, then acquitted on appeal. In June 2020, prosecutors pointed to Stig Engström, the “Skandia Man” — but he had died in 2000, so the case was closed without a trial, the murder weapon never found.
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