Stig Engström (suspected murderer)

Krister Petersson, prosecutor in charge of the investigation, announced the closing of the case at a press conference on 10 June 2020 and stated twenty years after Engström's death, he was the prime suspect in the murder,[1][2][3] but that the evidence against him would have been too weak for a trial.

[11] Engström was one of 20 people present at the scene when Swedish Prime Minister Palme was fatally shot with a .357 magnum revolver in central Stockholm on the evening of 28 February 1986.

[13] On leaving the building, he was wearing a dark coat, a cap that possibly had ear flaps, a colorful scarf, glasses and carried a small bag.

Complicating matters, the fact that Engström had sought media attention after the event reduced the evidentiary value of witness recollections of his appearance because his face had become publicly known.

[18] Engström had long been known to friends, colleagues, and family as an attention-seeking person with a taste for drama, and he had appeared a few times in the Swedish media before the assassination.

[21] The failure to solve Palme's assassination and repeated revelations of police misconduct made alternative theories about the murder begin to proliferate in the late 1980s and the 1990s.

[citation needed] Private enthusiasts, journalists, and authors began to propose a variety of possible suspects, scenarios and conspiracy theories, ranging from the CIA, the KGB, or Apartheid South Africa being involved to a variety of lone gunmen theories, police conspiracies, connections to the Bofors arms scandal and other plots, some more credible than others.

[citation needed] In the early 1990s, Olle Minell, a journalist for the communist magazine Proletären, depicted Engström as connected to a right-wing deep state intrigue against Palme.

[23][24] The allegation later reappeared in an article by the journalist Thomas Pettersson in the magazine Filter in 2018, and in his book Den osannolika mördaren ("The Unlikely Murderer"), which was published the same year.

According to Larsson and Pettersson's theories, which were developed separately but largely overlap, Engström had in fact arrived at the scene earlier than he admitted (which, according to Skandia's employee time clock, was quite possible) and spotted Palme only as he exited the building.

According to the Larsson-Pettersson argument, Engström then fled the area but counterintuitively almost immediately returned to the crime scene (Larsson) or straight to the Skandia building (Pettersson).

In particular, family and friends of Engström almost universally rejected the idea that he could have been a murderer by arguing that he had no reason to kill Palme, had never owned a gun, had no known criminal or extremist connections and had no record of violence.

Queried by investigators and by the press about the seeming discrepancies in Engström's witness testimony, they pointed to a history of attention-seeking, a taste for "drama", and a record of embellishing his own exploits to draw praise.

[29] On 10 June 2020, Engström was announced as the prime suspect in Palme's murder at a press conference by the Swedish Prosecuting Authority's investigator, Krister Petersson.

[30] The prosecutor explicitly denied having relied on the books by Lars Larsson and Thomas Pettersson but presented a strikingly similar description of the case.

[citation needed] The investigators' case rested on the fact that Engström was known to have been on or near the scene of the crime but had not been reliably identified as present after the shooting by any other witness, his own account of events was deemed unreliable and his clothing bore a resemblance to that of the murderer.

It emerged that investigators had tracked down and test-fired a gun that had been owned by an acquaintance of Engström (a fact first revealed by author Thomas Pettersson), but the results were inconclusive.

Some also questioned the legality or propriety of publicly naming Engström when even the prosecutor did not believe he had found evidence sufficient to convict him.

[41] Legal professionals, including the Swedish Bar Association, stated that a commission should be established to investigate Petersson's accusations since Engström, being dead, could not mount his own defense.