Original subtitles

The Prime Minister of Sweden, Mr Olof Palme,

has been assassinated. Police have closed off

the entire capital city of Stockholm.

They have few clues. His murder remains unsolved.

The murder is an open wound for the nation.

So, here they are.

This is a heavy one!

There is a huge amount of material.

These boxes changed everything for me.

Stieg Larsson, one of the world's greatest crime writers,

had spent a decade secretly investigating

the assassination of our Prime Minister.

When I saw the information he had gathered,

and all the connections, all the leads,

I realised I had to pull at the threads

that Stieg Larsson had left behind.

It was a battle for control of the world.

Their greatest threat was Olof Palme.

As I dug deeper,

I realised this was much bigger than I could ever have imagined.

We are definitely being lied to.

If it looks like a cover-up, if it smells as a cover-up...

...it is a cover-up.

We're heading pretty far north in Sweden.

The north of Sweden, it's... It's just a completely different world!

The trees are higher, the forests are deeper,

and you come closer to the wilderness.

Up here, it can get to minus 30, and the darkness...

The darkness gets to you.

The big questions,

would Putin use nuclear weapons in retaliation?

And if so, what would NATO do?

'In many ways, the ripple effects of the murder of Olof Palme

'are still playing out today,

'more than three decades after he was assassinated.'

Are we really on the edge of full-scale, nuclear war?

I was 21 years old when he was killed.

It was in 1986.

The whole world was in a Cold War turmoil.

And here, we had this genuinely progressive,

even radical alternative, stepping out on the world stage,

daring to argue for another way.

You cannot reach security by increasing the arms race.

And piling ever larger quantities of weapons.

You have, as I've said, to try to reach security together.

Olof Palme embodied hope.

That belief in progress.

His innate modesty.

His charm, his fluency, just came through.

This generation don't know who he was.

Olof Palme spent his life trying to free you.

And he gave his life, trying to free you.

He had a huge influence in international politics.

Much larger than the role of Sweden.

People listened to him, from all sides.

Whether they liked him or not, they listened.

How would you like to be remembered by people?

I don't mean that you're gonna die tomorrow.

But what would you like the first line of your obituary to say?

The moment people begin to think of their obituaries,

they start to be scared, they don't dare to do things,

and they lose their vitality.

The Scandinavian nation is in shock tonight.

This assassination has shaken the very foundations of Swedish society.

I don't think this thing can happen in Sweden.

We are not used to this sort of violence in this country.

What dawned on us was that there were forces in the dark

that we didn't know of.

All these years later, still,

there is a fog of doubt

about who actually killed Olof Palme.

That mystery still exists.

It's become a national sport of Sweden,

to solve the murder of our Prime Minister.

"Palme virus", that's what we call it. The "Palme virus".

The obsession of people trying to research the Palme murder.

You wouldn't want to get the Palme virus, trust me.

You'll see the cabin soon.

'When I started this, I had no idea where it would take me.

'I never thought it would take over my life in this way.

'And I never thought I would cross that many lines.'

Need to turn the power on...

There you go, and then I'm gonna go for the water.

'When I was young, I believed the official story.

'We were told it was this insane, lone killer.

'And I believed it, because everybody said so -

'the media, the police, the politicians.

'And then gradually, when I got into this story,

'I realised that that's just not true.'

So, come on in here and I'll show you some of my research.

I've got stuff from things that I asked from the police.

These are research files, my files.

I have everything that I scanned.

All the recordings, I keep on separate hard drives here.

I usually record either if I have a meeting or a phone call.

The police tried to get me to say things

that I really didn't see.

Obviously, the police, they're not doing anything,

so someone else has to, because it's still an unsolved murder.

It's pretty crazy, because I'm actually trained as an architect.

So, I have no reason to do this.

I'm not a detective or a journalist or anything like that.

But come over here, because this...

These boxes are the ones that actually changed everything.

This is where it started.

It's 2013.

There is a storage facility on the outskirts of Stockholm,

where I'm hoping there is archive material

on a building that I've been researching.

There is a room, packed with cardboard boxes.

Behind the first pile of boxes, I look at one,

and it says, "Stieg Larsson's archive."

My heart starts pounding. The archive of Stieg Larsson,

Sweden's most famous crime novelist, the father of "Nordic noir".

Author of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Over 100 million books sold. Movies with Daniel Craig.

After he died of a heart attack in 2004,

his papers were put away, packed into boxes and forgotten.

I take down one of the really heavy boxes.

It says, "The assassination of Olof Palme."

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Crime writer Stieg Larsson has spent 10 years

trying to solve the murder of our Prime Minister.

At first, I didn't know what to do with all of this information.

And I was a bit wary of getting dragged into this.

But I'm reading the handwriting of Stieg Larsson,

and I'm jumping into his world, when he was doing the research.

'Before any of his books were published,

'Stieg was actually working as a journalist.

'I managed to get permission from his colleagues to borrow all his files.'

This is the original map that he did,

only two days after the murder.

He got the assignment to do this.

He was actually one of the persons, I would say in Sweden,

that knew the most that soon after the murder,

and that's when he became obsessed.

'Stieg definitely caught the Palme virus.

'He was a hoarder and a workaholic and you can see it on his archive.

'It's so much material.

'Papers he wrote, articles he collected.'

"Palme murdered. Shot to death on a street."

Dossiers, maps, diagrams.

Networks of people.

There are police tip-offs, MI6 information, CIA information.

And I'm thinking, fucking hell!

So, more than three decades after the crime,

'I'm starting to wonder if the answer to this mystery

was hidden somewhere, deep down in Stieg Larsson's archive.

This is one letter written less than

three weeks after the murder, and Stieg is writing it to someone

called Jerry, in London or in England at least.

And it says, "The assassination of the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme

"is one of the most unbelievable and amazing cases of homicide

"I have ever had the unpleasant job of covering.

"First of all, what happened and what is known about the killing?

"A couple of minutes past 11 o'clock on the night of Friday,

"28th February, Mr Palme left the Grand Cinema

"in the company of his wife and son.

"The visit to the cinema had been decided upon

"some time during the day of Friday,

"but their plans were not common knowledge.

"The Prime Minister had told his security guards

"that he would not need them for the evening.

"Outside the cinema, Mr Palme and his wife say goodbye to their son

"and decided to walk their way home.

"The son noticed a man following the couple,

"but could not see any details of his face.

"The couple headed south, down the main street, named Sveavagen.

"A second witness noticed the man following

"and said that in front of the PM, another two men were walking.

"His impression was that they made a group,

"and concluded they were Palme's security.

"The following is established through testimonies of several witnesses."

That night, me and my friends had been to a concert.

I parked at this cash machine, two metres from the lights.

"The Prime Minister and his wife walked down Sveavagen,

"crossed the street, and continued

"towards the junction with Tunnelgatan."

My friends are standing in line for the cash machine.

Then I see on the other side of the street,

in front of the shop window, a guy standing there.

Like he's on the lookout.

I just got that feeling. He's waiting for something.

Then, there came a man and a woman.

And this guy put his hand on the man's left shoulder,

and took up something.

"The bullet entered her coat at one shoulder and exited at the other.

"Somehow, only scraping her back."

His wife was screaming and went down on her knee.

And the guy was standing there watching them, to see...

...if he had succeeded, I guess.

This guy, when he moved, he was very, very controlled.

He appeared like he was well trained, military.

He just vanished into the alley.

The killer made his escape along what appears to have been

"a well-planned route of escape.

"Up the stairs at the end of Tunnel Street,

"which disabled any pursuit by car."

And I sensed the tragedy of it all.

Of this brutal, horrific crime,

on the streets of Stockholm, affects everybody.

All the people that witnessed the crime,

the rescue service, the police.

How it's an attack on the Swedish democracy.

I will never forget that night.

I'd gone early to bed. My phone rang...

This is the Secret Services.

Lisbeth Palme has asked us to call you and inform you

that Olof Palme has been murdered.

She wants you to come immediately to the hospital.

My name is Ulf Dahlsten, and in 1986, I was Chief of Staff

to the Prime Minister, Olof Palme.

It's the first murder of this type in our democracy.

It was totally unexpected.

Protests, anything. But murder? No.

I went to the hospital, to visit Lisbeth Palme.

She was obviously in shock.

She had a big bandage on her back. She avoided being killed

by turning when the shot was fired.

I will never forget that,

because there was blood all over her clothes.

I don't know if it was her blood or it was Olof's blood.

The whole thing was absolutely shocking.

She had even shoes that were filled with blood,

and that when she was walking,

you got these footstep prints in blood.

The confirmation of his death only reached us

when we came to the hospital.

The night that my father was killed,

I was thinking, how can I get through this?

It's been difficult to deal with the fact that he died the way he did.

For me and my family, my brothers and mother, and for this country.

Because his death was so dramatic and tragic.

I know that my father liked these pictures.

By 1969, I'm 11.

And we moved into this house earlier the same year.

And this is also the time when my father was

elected Chairman of the Social Democratic Party,

and Prime Minister.

I remember him like a very warm person.

Full of humour, and also being very brave,

to confront societal injustices, wherever he saw them.

For me, it's difficult to imagine that things like that

just happen out of the blue.

It's very difficult to have any, any clear view what...

You know, who or why.

Good evening. Sweden is in a state of shock tonight.

Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, shot and killed.

Police have closed off the entire capital city of Stockholm.

They are looking for the assassin right now.

Stieg wrote, "We have a dead Prime Minister

"and a killer that's seemingly vanished into thin air."

Police have launched the biggest manhunt Sweden's ever seen,

but so far, they have no idea who the killer is

or what his motive was. The more I look through

Stieg's files, the more I start feeling that he was actually

pursuing a parallel investigation to the police.

I think Stieg was obsessed with finding the truth.

Because he could see what the police were doing

would turn this into a complete catastrophe.

I woke up in the morning. I was off duty and I turned the radio on,

and I heard this serious music.

Olof Palme has been shot on Sveavagen during the night.

My name is Sonny Bjork, and I was scene of crime officer in 1986.

So, I called my unit and they said,

"Please come to investigate the crime scene."

We are on Tunnelgatan,

where Olof and Lisbeth Palme was shot.

It's right here on the sidewalk, where you see the plate.

When I got to the crime scene, it was a very small area

that was roped off.

This is not good, it's a lot people walking around here,

and possibility to contaminate the crime scene.

Destroy evidence like shoe prints and so on.

I would say it was a big mistake.

So, we immediately understood we have to enlarge this area.

And put a cordon further north, and also south.

There's a possibility that you have the bullets

remaining on the crime scene.

We used metal detectors all over the area,

but it's a lot of metal here all the time,

so it was beeping more or less permanently,

and we didn't find anything.

The first bullet was found on the other side.

We didn't find it. It was a journalist

who found the first bullet.

He came here before us in the morning,

and found the bullet, then gave it to the police officers.

This is the column where the second bullet was found.

It was found about here...

The bullet was found by a dog, buried in the snow.

We missed that one. Of course, it's also embarrassing

that we didn't find the first bullet or the second bullet.

Police tonight found the bullet they believe

killed the Prime Minister, and revealed it was

a .357 Magnum projectile, normally fired from

a Smith Wesson revolver, one of the most powerful

handguns in the world.

The problem is that when the bullets were sent down

to our National Forensic Laboratory, they were trying to match

the bullets to each other and they cleaned them,

and probably washed away blood, body fluid, tissue and so on.

It's difficult, because there is so little physical evidence

that could link a person to this killing.

Yeah, it's some kind of sadness.

That we were not able to clear the case.

DAHLSTEN:12 hours after the murder,

we learnt that a regional police chief

wanted to take over the murder investigation himself.

In charge of Sweden's biggest murder hunt,

Stockholm's police chief, Hans Holmer,

who told the world's press today he had no hot clues.

At the moment, would it be fair to say you have no idea whatsoever?

No, it's the typical situation for the moment

when you start a big murder case like this.

You have to be patient and impatient in a sort of mixture.

He had been the head of the Secret Services before,

but he had never ever been close to a murder investigation himself.

He was tall, he was good looking.

And he got lots of letters from ladies around the country!

He would become a hero, if he solved the case.

My name is Ann-Marie Asheden, and in 1986,

I was working as a special reporter at a newspaper.

My chief editor got the idea, it would be interesting

to have a reporter speaking to Holmer

and then publish a story when the murder was solved.

I started meeting with Hans Holmer once a day,

and I recorded everything.

Holmer is under pressure all the time.

From the media, from the government. From everybody.

Hans Holmer never really interested himself

for the scene of the crime, what really happened.

What do the witnesses say?

The police did not talk to all the witnesses,

and didn't even take notes of their names.

Stig Engstrom is a witness who contacted the police several times,

to ask to be interviewed.

Stig Engstrom is a graphic designer at the insurance company Skandia,

that is situated very close to the crossing

where Palme was assassinated.

He was working late that evening.

He leaves work, and he stumbles on the crime scene.

He is not invited to the reconstruction that the police made.

And that made him very disappointed.

Hans Holmer considered him an attention-seeking person.

Early on, my mother lost trust in the police

because the information that she gave to Hans Holmer

was not properly documented, or used in the investigation.

Hans Holmer did not write down or process

the information that she gave him.

The world mourns a man of peace.

There was massive security in Stockholm for the funeral

of Sweden's murdered Prime Minister, Olof Palme.

I had suppressed feelings for so many days.

And I know exactly when I let them out, and that was at his funeral.

Then I allowed myself to feel, allowed myself to cry.

I can still... feel very strongly about that moment, actually.

Political representatives from over 100 countries

attended the civil memorial, to a man renowned for his work

toward nuclear disarmament and world peace.

It was a personal loss for me

and it was a loss for the rest of the world.

Olof Palme believed in the things that he was talking about.

Freedom, and anti-imperialism.

The funeral, with a massive presence of world leaders,

made me proud of my father.

But also, it told us why he was so opposed as well.

Because he was upsetting the status quo,

with his activism on the international scene.

The crowd was huge.

I think everybody was moved by the sheer...

...desperate sadness of it all.

To Stieg, it was not only a matter of solving a mystery,

but it also was a question of democracy.

If it was possible to kill the Prime Minister of Sweden

and get away with it, you could actually kill democracy.

And if he would solve the murder, he would also save democracy.

A massive manhunt is continuing in an effort to find

the gunman who assassinated Prime Minister Olof Palme.

So, there are quite a few signs of what Stieg

thought about the investigation. For instance, you have here a headline,

"Sherlock Holmer", obviously pointing to the head of the investigation,

Hans Holmer. Stieg writes, "There was hardly a lead

"that was not bungled one way or another."

This is the sort of murder weapon we are looking for.

It's a revolver, Smith Wesson .357.

Investigators say the ammunition was armour-piercing,

- copper coated. - They now believe the gunman was a professional hit man

who did not act alone.

Months two and three in the investigation,

Hans Holmer was depressed.

They didn't get any good lead.

They didn't move forward.

Then in May, they get a new lead.

That changes everything.

PKK is a Kurdish, Marxist-Leninist organisation

that didn't hesitate to use violence.

Their many enemy was Turkey,

but they were stamped as a terrorist organisation by Palme's government.

A new witness tells the police that they were celebrating

because Palme had been murdered.

He thought that the best way was to make a big raid,

and take in a lot of people and make them talk.

The police fetched all those people and took them to the police house.

They started to question them, and after a couple of hours,

the prosecutors decided to let everybody go.

There is no substance to this theory at all,

and yet he became convinced of it.

Are you any more hopeful now than you were 3-4 months ago,

that you might the murderer of the Prime Minister?

No.

So, the raid led to nothing.

It was a shockingly bad investigation,

that left a lot of blanks.

And it was a scandal.

'It was sort of in the air, that he had to go.'

That year that he was in charge is considered a lost year.

I don't think he was stupid at all. I think he was rather intelligent.

I think he knew what he was doing.

It's my conviction that he was not there to solve the crime,

but to give it a politically acceptable solution.

It was obvious from some of the files in Stieg's material

that he was suspicious of what the role of the police actually was.

He's thinking that maybe it's even an active decision

not to solve the murder.

So, it's the time when he starts his belief

that there was a conspiracy behind it.

So, this was definitely something that he was researching.

'But at the time, the investigation was going in a different direction.'

In early 1988, there is a new head of investigation,

Hans Olvebro. In one of the first days in the office,

he says, "This is not a conspiracy, it's a lone killer."

His world was the street, and for him, it was natural

to look for a murderer among known criminals.

And they focus on a guy named Christer Pettersson.

The unidentified man reportedly has three

previous convictions, including a fatal stabbing near the spot

where Palme was gunned down. Someone gave a tip to the police

that you should look into that guy. He's violent, he has killed before.

He was a petty thief, robber, drug addict.

And tonight, prosecutors in Sweden

are now saying a man in custody probably assassinated

Prime Minister Olof Palme.

They arranged a line-up with Lisbeth Palme, the wife of Olof Palme.

But she had been told by the prosecutor beforehand,

they were investigating an alcoholic.

And the first thing she said was,

"Well, it's easy to see who's the alcoholic here."

Because the line-up consisted of policemen and firefighters,

who did not look like alcoholics.

And she identifies him, saying,

"He's similar to my description of the murderer."

She was helped by the prosecutor, which was completely outrageous.

The case against Christer Pettersson is only that

he is a drug dealer that lives close to the cinema

where Olof Palme went that night.

And he was at an illegal gambling club in the neighbourhood.

No-one had seen him at Sveavagen,

or the corner where the killing took place.

Then when it becomes his turn to speak,

says that he is just a pawn, that he's a scapegoat.

That there are bigger things going on.

A court in Stockholm has sentenced a 42-year-old vagrant

to life imprisonment for the murder of Sweden's Prime Minister

Olof Palme three years ago.

Petterson denied that he was anywhere near

the scene of the murder. Most of the evidence against him

was circumstantial. Even the prosecutor admitted

it could find no clear-cut motive for Palme's killing.

My mother was convinced it was Christer Petterson.

At that time, I believed they had got the right guy.

But then over the years, I had to re-evaluate my position.

In November '89, after almost 11 months in jail,

the High Court says that the case against him is unreliable,

and he's released.

'The police were pushing this theory about the lone killer,

'and it all ended up in this complete failure,

'with the acquittal of Christer Petterson.'

I could see Stieg was exploring something much bigger.

If it wasn't a lone wolf, it meant it was organised.

And in that case, by who and why?

When you go through all the files, there were actually several witnesses

that saw clear signs that this was not just a lone killer.

And that it was a very much organised set-up to kill our Prime Minister.

This was 1986, there were no mobile phones around.

So, any sighting of a walkie-talkie

would be something out of the ordinary.

So, there were at least 36 witnesses that saw men with walkie-talkies

in the night of the murder. There were sightings just next to

the apartment where Olof Palme and his wife lived.

On the way to the cinema, where they took the underground.

And then, close to the place where they were actually shot.

Palme had called off the security for the night.

They were not the security, so who were they?

There are so many signs that this was not just a lone killer.

Here is actually something that is really interesting.

It's one of the warnings that was handed in

eight days prior to the murder. It says, "Olof Palme is dead."

This was handed in to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

by a right-winger called Anders Larsson,

a person that Stieg Larsson had been researching before the murder.

And the second one was handed in by an equally interesting person.

Ivan von Birchan, a mercenary from Yugoslavia.

In the month before the murder, he called into the police,

and said that he had been offered a huge amount of money

to shoot Olof Palme.

Stieg Larsson knew of both these people before the murder.

He had been researching the circles that both of them were part of.

I soon realised that I had to step into his shoes,

and try to connect the threads.

And in the end, hand it in to the police.

But there is one problem, Anders Larsson is already deceased...

But one possibility remains, and that's Ivan von Birchan,

the mercenary from Yugoslavia.

He's still alive, and he's living in Sweden.

Yes, hello. My name is Jan Stocklassa.

Am I talking to Ivan von Birchan?

My name is Ivan von Birchan,

and in 1986,

I was asked by CIA to kill Olof Palme.

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