The 33-year-old:
The first to be arrested as a suspect, already in March 1986, after several tips that the man had expressed hateful comments about Palme. However, he was released early on. Murdered in the USA in 1993.
Christer Pettersson:
He was questioned by the police a couple of months after the murder, but was not arrested as a suspect until 1988. The following year, Lisbeth Palme singled out Pettersson and he was sentenced to life imprisonment in Stockholm District Court for the murder. Pettersson was, however, acquitted in 1989 by the Svea Court of Appeal. In October 2001, Christer Pettersson confessed to his friend Gert Fylking that he murdered Palme, something he later retracted and said that he neither confirmed nor denied. Pettersson died in 2004.
The PKK trail:
20 Kurds, including twelve PKK supporters, were questioned in 1987. This was against the background that the organization, declared by the government as a terrorist organization, was believed to have had both motives and the ability to strike against Swedish interests. However, nothing more concrete has emerged since then.
The South Africa track:
Came into focus in 1996. The theory was that the South African intelligence service was behind the assassination of the prime minister because of Palme's fight against the country's then apartheid regime. A then 45-year-old man who was identified as a mercenary and professional killer has not been interviewed by the police, but he denies that he committed the crime.
The Skandia man:
Stig Engström was involved early in the investigation as a witness. He worked at the insurance company Skandia next to the murder scene and claimed to have laid Olof Palme in a prone side position. Early in the investigation, Engström was dismissed as both a witness and perpetrator. However, in a report in Filter in 2018, he was singled out as a suspect, and later also by prosecutor Krister Petersson when he closed the Palme investigation in 2020. According to the prosecutor, Engström had knowledge of weapons and moved in circles critical of Palme. Petersson also stated that his clothing was consistent with testimony about the fleeing perpetrator. Stig Engström died in 2000.
The Gunslinger:
A trail that has received a lot of attention in the past year, after Jon Jordås's book "The last book about the murder of Olof Palme" from 2024 and SvD's podcast series "The man with the revolver". The man in question was the only revolver owner in Stockholm who stayed away when the police wanted to test-fire possible murder weapons, and then said he had sold the weapon illegally. According to the investigations, there are a long list of additional circumstances that mean the man should be considered a suspect in the murder. Several Palme investigators describe him as the most interesting piece of information in the entire murder investigation, according to SvD. The man died in 2008.
