Thousands rally to pay homage to Anna Lindh (original) (raw)

TENS of thousands of mourners attended rallies across Sweden last night to pay homage to Anna Lindh, the country’s Foreign Minister, and express outrage at her assassination.

In Stockholm, 50,000 people staged the country’s biggest demonstration since the Vietnam war. “We lost her, but our anger over the loss must not paralyse us,” Göran Persson, the Prime Minister, said as he urged the throng to vote in tomorrow’s referendum on joining the euro.

Before he spoke, the Foreign Ministry disclosed that Ms Lindh had been threatened by letter and e-mail in the weeks before her murder. The threats were not passed on to the police.

Surveillance tape recovered from the department store where Ms Lindh was stabbed showed footage of a man who could be the killer. Among the shoppers “one particularly interesting person . . . has caught our eye,” Leif Jennekvist, the police commissioner, said.

A small army of police officers was trawling through homeless shelters, underground train tunnels and Stockholm’s bushy parks in search of Ms Lindh’s assassin, who is thought to be a mentally disturbed loner who may have killed before.

“This is not the act of a novice criminal. The killer has done this kind of thing before,” Mr Jennekvist said.

A 3ft mound of flowers surrounded by hundreds of candles has built up in front of the department store. Across the country spontaneous shrines of roses have appeared under campaign posters showing Ms Lindh appealing for a “yes” vote in tomorrow’s referendum.

Swedes are finding it difficult to understand how the killer could simply disappear from such a public space and their sorrow at the minister’s death is turning to impatience with the security services. “What kind of society is it that cannot protect its own government?” Kirsti, a 40-year-old nurse at the Stockholm rally, said.

Ms Lindh’s killer, wearing a baseball cap that hid his face and a combat jacket, appears to have followed her from the Foreign Ministry through a shopping arcade and on to the first floor of the NK department store. The stabbing took barely three minutes and by the time that an ambulance arrived the killer, said to be in his thirties, beardless, long-haired and with bad skin, was two blocks away having discarded his bloodstained jacket.

That coat, the hat and the knife are being tested for DNA and fingerprints. Police are looking for a 50-year-old female witness who they believe can give a more precise description of the man. So far closed-circuit television images of the man are not clear enough to issue an accurate Identikit portrait, but more than 1,000 Stockholmers have called a hotline with tips, some of which were described by police yesterday as “very useful”.

The police are determined to avoid a repeat of the hamfisted 1986 investigation into the murder of Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister, a still unsolved killing that is the source of many conspiracy theories. Mr Palme was killed while strolling in Stockholm without a bodyguard; Ms Lindh was also unguarded, on a relaxed outing with a woman friend.

Stockholm’s equivalent of the Special Branch, the Sapo, has come under heavy criticism as a result. “How naive can our police be?” asked a newspaper headline yesterday.

As the tension mounts, so friction increases between the different investigating units: the Sapo, the regional Stockholm force and the city police. They are united, however, in their irritation with politicians.

The Foreign Ministry said yesterday that Ms Lindh had received at least one e-mailed death threat on August 27 and admitted that it had failed to pass the information on to the Sapo threat analysis team. The e-mail, branding her a “power-crazy bitch”, was not even shown to the minister. “She did not like to be shown such things,” the Foreign Ministry official said.

The police have developed a profile of the killer: almost certainly a man with a record of psychological disturbance, a solitary person who perhaps received medical treatment and was released when psychiatric wards began to close in recent years because of public spending cuts.

Many of those patients were supposed to return to the care of their families but ended up living under bridges or in shelters.

This summer a disturbed man has already taken a car in Stockholm’s old town district and deliberately slammed into passers-by, and a pensioner has been beaten to death with an iron bar. After Ms Lindh’s murder, a five-year-old girl was knifed by another psychiatric patient.

That is the area that Swedish detectives are searching. It seemed briefly as if they had caught their man — a 32-year-old with mental problems, known for threatening people with a knife and for yelling neo-Nazi slogans at foreigners. He was brought in with a handful of other suspects after raids on homeless shelters on Thursday night, but subsequently released. Other men were being questioned last night, but the police made clear that they have still to catch the killer.