The secret police’s searches had yielded no results. At the Opera Cellar there were “so many dishwashers and janitors of foreign extraction that the tip based on the description was of very limited use.” It was thus not possible to locate any “Yussef, alternatively Yussuf, Ibrahim at the referenced place of business.” The one who best agreed with the meager facial description, a Tunisian, first name Ali, had an alibi for the relevant points in time and was still filed in the “Iran/Iraq” binder despite his place of origin and despite the fact that the secret police had eliminated him over twenty years earlier.
Wonder how the informant knew his name was Yussef? thought Mattei and sighed. And only after another three hours of browsing and reading was it time for her to take yet another binder out of the pile.
Suleyman Özök, born on February 28, 1949, and thus thirty-seven years old to the day when the prime minister was murdered, had come to Sweden in 1970, trained as a mechanic, and at the time of the murder was working as a repairman at Haga Auto Body Repair on Hagagatan in Stockholm. According to the informant “only a stone’s throw from the crime scene.”
The informant had not demanded to be anonymous other than in relationship to the perpetrator about whom he intended to turn in information. Fourteen days after the murder he visited the detective bureau on Kungsholmsgatan in Stockholm and reported that he was “a hundred and twenty percent certain that Suleyman Özök had murdered Sweden’s prime minister.”
According to the informant, Özök was actually a secret agent for the Turkish military dictatorship and his work at the auto body repair shop was only a cover. His real mission was to keep the Kurdish refugees in the country under surveillance and if needed conduct “wet work” for his employers.
Özök was an almost notorious Palme hater, and the reason was the support that Palme and the Swedish government had given to the Kurds who fled from Turkey and sought asylum in Sweden. Özök had access to “at least one pistol and a revolver” that he had shown the informant on several occasions. Most recently, on Tuesday of the same week the prime minister was murdered, he had taken the revolver out of the glove compartment of his car, shown it to the informant, and on the same occasion said that over the weekend he “intended to celebrate my birthday in an honorable way by shooting that swine Olof Palme.”
The same evening the prime minister was murdered the informant “by pure coincidence” happened to pass Tegnérlunden in Stockholm, “only a stone’s throw from the Grand cinema,” and then discovered that Özök’s private car was parked on the street on the north side of Tegnérlunden. Because he did not know that the prime minister “was sitting watching a movie just then only a stone’s throw farther down the street,” he hadn’t thought any more about it, but instead took the subway home to his apartment on Stigfinnargränd in Hagsätra, where he also spent the night.
When he turned on the TV the next morning he was in such severe shock that it took fourteen days before he managed to gather himself to the point that he could contact the police.
Apparently he had made a deep impression on them. Özök had immediately been categorized under the lead file that then still went under the designation “Turkey/PKK.” The investigator presented the case to the prosecutor, who decided that Özök should be picked up for questioning without prior summons and that the police should do a search of his house in Skogås, his car, and his place of work.
The efforts were extensive. The outcome meager. No weapons had been found. The closest they got was some fishing equipment. Özök was an enthusiastic sports fisherman both in Stockholm’s archipelago and in various lakes in the vicinity of the capital. In addition he liked soccer and had been a loyal Hammarby supporter for many years. Most of all he was upset at the police and their informant.
He had never had any firearms. Thus he could never have shown anyone any. He admired Olof Palme, a great man and politician. He had never expressed criticism of him. Much less threatened him. On the contrary, he had taken his side in a number of political discussions at his workplace, Haga Auto Body Repair. He had been a Swedish citizen for many years. He did not intend to return to Turkey even on vacation. Turkey was a military dictatorship. Suleyman Özök was a democrat, a Social Democrat to be precise, and a proud one. He preferred to live in social democratic Sweden despite the sorrow and loss after Palme. He had given up hope on his old homeland long ago.
Finally he had a message for the anonymous informant. If he did not immediately stop harassing him and his new woman, Suleyman would deal with the matter personally. On the other hand he did not intend to make a police complaint. In an auto body repairman’s world there were more substantial, manly means, if such were required.
“You can tell him that if he even tries to touch my lady I’ll stuff a welding iron up his ass,” said Suleyman Özök to his interviewer, but it hadn’t amounted to more than that.
From the concluding notation in Özök’s file it appeared that “Suleyman has been engaged for some time to a former female acquaintance of the informant. Özök’s fiancée works as a secretary at Stockholm University and lives in a service apartment at Teknologgatan 2, in the vicinity of Tegnérlunden. She does not appear in the crime registry.”
Late on Friday afternoon Lewin and Mattei took a long coffee break at an Italian café in the vicinity of police headquarters and discussed their findings of the past week. They each had a café latte. Mattei threw all moderation overboard and feasted on some tiramisu while the ever-cautious Lewin was content to nibble at the biscotti with almond and nuts that came with his coffee. Despite the weekend calm, the beautiful weather, the cheerful atmosphere at the table, and the article of faith that they must always embrace the situation, it had been a conversation under a cloud of resignation.
Together they had reviewed-or at least read about-almost a thousand suspects who, in at least a formal sense, met their criteria of a qualified perpetrator. Upon closer consideration, few of them proved to fulfill these criteria, and what they all had in common was that nothing tangible argued for their having murdered the prime minister twenty years ago. There was a shortage of motives, and even if the police had found the means and opportunities they still would not have been able to find the motive, although hundreds of man-hours had been devoted to certain cases.
At the same time only a few of the suspects could be ruled out with complete certainty. The normal reason was that they were in a correctional facility at the time of the crime, not on the run or on leave or able to sneak out unnoticed. That it was certain that they had been somewhere else, sufficiently far away or with people who were reliable enough that the police could live with their alibis. In summary almost all were investigative question marks, difficult enough to straighten out back then, probably quite impossible to get straight today.
A contributing reason to the latter was that a strikingly large share of them were now dead. When the prime minister was shot, the median age of the men in the group that Lewin and Mattei were reviewing was just over forty. Today it was sixty plus among the sixty percent of them who were still alive.
There were unusual causes of death. Twenty of them had been murdered over the years. Compared with regular, decent folk this was a hundred times more than the expected rate. A hundred of them had committed suicide, a rate twenty-five times greater than it ought to have been. Another couple of hundred had died in accidents, of drug abuse-related diseases, or of “unknown” causes. That rate was ten times greater than normal. Finally fifty or so had simply “disappeared,” and it was unclear where and why.