Swedish police said on Wednesday they had dismissed a former secret agent for South Africa’s apartheid regime as a possible suspect in the unsolved assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme 17 years ago.
Swedish police chief Lars Nylen confirmed press reports that Palme investigators had traveled abroad in recent days to question the man, identified in South African media as Roy Allen (54).
”The information we received during the interrogation is now going to be analysed, but it is clear that the interrogation strengthens our earlier theories that this is an attempt to swindle intelligence services,” Nylen told Swedish news agency TT.
Palme, a vociferous opponent of South Africa’s apartheid policies, was gunned down by an unidentified man while walking home from a Stockholm cinema with his wife on February 28, 1986.
Swedish media reported recently that former officers who served under the apartheid regime had proof implicating members of the inner circle of former South African president PW Botha in the Palme killing.
In an interview published in tabloid Aftonbladet on Tuesday, Allen, who lives in Perth, Australia, said he was not the murderer.
Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, which broke the story in a series of articles starting January 20, said ”an original military document” dated November 20, 1985, showed that the orders for an operation dubbed ”Slingshot”, whose target was identified as ”OP”, came directly from Botha’s chief security advisor, who was not named.
The document was a letter sent to the chief operating officer of the apartheid regime’s secret police, Craig Williamson, whose name has already surfaced in the murder investigation.
According to the letter, Palme was to be murdered between February 21 and 23, 1986, during an anti-apartheid conference, which was attended by African National Congress (ANC) leader Oliver Tambo.
Palme was actually shot one week later.
The killing has baffled investigators and despite thousands of leads, the murder remains a mystery. They have never uncovered a motive nor found a murder weapon.
A self-professed drug and alcohol addict, Christer Pettersson, who was identified by Palme’s widow as the killer, was convicted of the murder in 1989 but acquitted on appeal four months later.
A 50-million-kronor (5.8-million-dollar, 5.43-million-euro) reward has been offered for information that helps solve the crime. – Sapa-AFP