He festers in a prison cell with no company but his own and those of the demons that haunt him.
Mijailo Mihajlovic is soon to be formally charged with a assassination that stunned Europe — the stabbing of one of the best loved and most widely admired politicians of her time, Sweden’s Foreign Minister, Anna Lindh.
She died a day after being attacked on 10 September while out with a friend, and without a security guard, at the Nordisk Kompaniet department store in Stockholm city centre, shopping for something to wear for a television debate on the euro.
According to prosecutors, Mihajlovic shows no emotion, not of fear, nor anxiety, remorse or even defiance — his lawyer says he will deny murder. He eats his meals alone at Kronobergshaket jail, and takes limited exercise in a covered-in yard. Otherwise, he sits motionless and silent in front of video games or a television, screened of all coverage of his case.
The detailed indictment expected in December, will charge the 24-year-old, born of a Serbian family migrated to Sweden, with a crime that confounded a nation priding itself on civility, transparency and enlightenment — but which has suffered its second major assassination in a generation, after that of Olof Palme in 1986.
Lindh’s killing was the fourth of a leading statesperson in postwar Europe: Palme, General Franco’s Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco, Lord Mountbatten and Italian former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. While Palme’s case remains a mystery, the others were the work of determined revolutionaries — Basque separatists, the IRA and Red Brigades.
But Lindh was a different politician: close to her people, a devoted mother, defender of the oppressed — Palestinians, Kurds, Bosnians and Kosovars. Also by contrast she fell victim, allegedly, to a man of few focused political beliefs beyond a vague Serbian nationalism mingled with a history of psychiatric disorder and violence.
According to a friend of Mihajlovic, he decided to kill Lindh after a speech she made supporting Nato strikes against Serbia and Serbian troops in Kosovo in March 1999.
But the mind that allegedly hatched the assassination harboured deep psychological disorders as well as the proclaimed loyalty to former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. For years, Mihajlovic had been in and out of the authorities’ grasp, in borstal, and on a particular Swedish brand of psychiatric probation.
Agneta Blidberg, vice-head of the prosecution service leading this investigation, is convinced she has Lindh’s killer. Swedish police last week confirmed to The Observer DNA samples taken from the knife with which Lindh was stabbed, and from a baseball cap discarded by her killer, matched genetic material from Mihajlovic. The DNA analyses were conducted by experts at the Forensic Science Service in Birmingham.
Mihajlovic’s capture has been almost as compelling as his past is gruesome – at one point during the hunt, he was detained, but released.
Pressure on the authorities was acute — their failure to find Palme’s killer having become a matter of national shame. At first, the hunt went badly wrong. Per Olof Svensson, an upper-class man, aged 36, known for his neo-Nazi sympathies, was detained. He had been arrested before — for daubing swastikas around town.
But from 17 September, acting on a tip-off from a family friend, police had been tailing Mihajlovic. According to press reports, he had — after the murder — gone to a psychiatric outpatients’ department asking for treatment, been questioned, and let go.
On 24 September, Mihajlovic was taken into custody after a special squad scaled a wall of the block of flats where he lived in a working-class suburb south of Stockholm.
According to leaked police reports, Mihajlovic took an expensive taxi ride home from town after Lindh’s death, to find his mother and her friend ‘Marie’ watching the coverage on television. Mihajlovic immediately recognised her son on a security video clip from the NK store. ‘Marie’ says Mihajlovic then took a nap. His mother disappeared and is believed to be in protective custody.
A trawl around Mihajlovic’s favourite clubs and bars reveals a man well known but little liked. He was, say acquaintances, obsessed by fame, desperate to achieve it by killing someone famous. He reportedly told one friend: ‘If I killed someone famous I would have criminal status, and be able to jump the queues for all the hottest bars’.
This obsession extended to him insisting Tom Cruise be appointed as his lawyer, convinced his idol would get him off after seeing a film in which Cruise plays a high-powered attorney.
Aged seven, Mihajlovic was sent with his sister to live with their grandparents in a village near Belgrade, returning to Sweden as teenagers, to a violent home. Family acquaintances do not speak well of the suspect’s father, who holds fervent Serbian nationalist views.
But Mihajlovic was not, it seems, politically motivated. At 17 he was arrested for attacking his father with a knife, and sent to juvenile prison. He was obsessed by knives, and was twice arrested for weapons possession and for harassing a 15-year-old girl who did not return his attentions. He was convicted of threatening to kill her family, and put on psychiatric probation.
On the night of 12 March 1999, Nato aircraft flew bombing missions over Yugoslavia in response to the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Albanian civilians in Kosovo. Lindh was Foreign Minister of a non-Nato country that prides itself on the role of global broker, but, having sided with such causes as Bosnia and Kosovo’s Albanians, she spoke in support of the intervention. It may have been her death sentence.
Tension ensued within Sweden’s large ex-Yugoslav community — including many Serbs loyal to Milosevic. Mihajlovic was apparently anxious to volunteer for service — either in a Stockholm turf war, or in a unit departing to Kosovo.
Serbians operate a muscular presence in Stockholm’s criminal underworld, which hit the headlines in February 1998 with the murder of gangland leader, Dragan Joksovic, and again with a shoot-out at one of Mihajlovic’s favourite pubs, over cigarette smuggling.
The Joksovic murder was linked to the now deceased Belgrade gangster ‘Arkan’, a confidant of Milosevic, in a dispute over protection rackets in Sweden. Mihajlovic tried to attach himself to the gangster’s circle, only to be brushed off. ‘Too crazy,’ they said.
In the run-up to Sweden’s vote on the euro, Lindh was denounced for her pro-euro stance. Her Ministry asked the security services to give her protection. The request was turned down.
At 12.45pm on 10 September, Mihajlovic was seen around Stockholm’s Central Station at the time Lindh arrived from her home town of Nykoping. At 4.10 Lindh was at the NK store where Mihajlovic was seen ‘acting nervously’. Mihajlovic allegedly said he then heard an inner voice saying: ‘Do it now, kill her’. – Guardian Unlimited