No suspect, say police hunting minister's killer
Swedish police said today they have no main suspect for the murder of Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, but are checking on a number of known criminals they want to question in connection with her brutal stabbing.
“In a case like this, police are always looking at known perpetrators who have committed things like this before,” said police spokesman Lars Groenskog.
“ In this work you always look how the descriptions fit the person witnesses have described and if they have been in the area of the killing.”
Swedish media reported that police were looking for a 32-year-old man with a criminal record.
However, Groenskog said that was “definitely not true.”
Police overnight searched shelters and lodgings in Stockholm looking for suspects.
“There is new information coming in all the time,” said police official Mats Nylen.
There was still no results of the technical analysis of the clothes or the murder weapon, a knife, which the killer is believed to have thrown away when fleeing the scene of the murder, he said.
Lindh, touted as a future prime minister, died yesterday from multiple stab wounds, the second Swedish politician to be murdered in the Scandinavian country in 17 years in a rare act of public violence.
Police said they were hunting for a stocky man with bad skin believed to be about 30-year-old, who stabbed the 46-year-old mother of two in the stomach, chest and arm in a Stockholm department store.
The attack raised security concerns in Sweden where it is common to see a prime minister jogging without bodyguards or police, and politicians strolling the streets with their families.
Critics said Sweden’s security agency, known as Sapo, should have learned more from the killing of Prime Minister Olaf Palme 17 years ago. He was shot while walking home from a cinema with his wife and the murder has not been solved.
Like Lindh, Palme had no bodyguard.
