Sweden Vanishing Face on a Quiet Street

By Michael S. Serrill.

It was the kind of coincidence that police often depend upon to solve difficult crimes. A 22-year-old woman was walking along a street in central Stockholm shortly before midnight on Feb. 28 when a man ran by her and paused under a streetlight. In that brief instant, she got a good look at the person who only moments before may have gunned down Prime Minister Olof Palme. The woman turned out to be a portrait artist, and last week she helped police assemble a composite sketch of the suspected assassin. Copies of the computer- enhanced likeness were immediately transmitted around the world by wire services. Said Stockholm Police Commissioner Hans Holmer: "This is the first witness who has given us a face."

By week's end the sketch had produced no arrests. Danish police briefly detained two Yugoslavs after they crossed from Sweden to Denmark on a ferry, then released them. Commissioner Holmer revealed at a midweek news conference that his officers had followed up on 4,000 leads and interviewed 600 people. He also announced that the 120-officer team investigating the case was being expanded to 300, and that the police were offering an unprecedented $70,000 reward for information leading to the assassin's conviction. Said Holmer: "This is a murder that cannot be compared to any other."

| The commissioner fended off accusations that his men had bungled the probe from the beginning. Swedish newspapers charged that police were slow in cordoning off the scene of the crime and did not set up roadblocks out of the city until 90 minutes after the murder. Investigators were reportedly so sloppy in examining the scene that the only physical evidence of the shooting, two bullets, was actually found by passersby. And police drew scorn upon themselves when they publicly announced their puzzlement at the origin and uniqueness of the copper-tipped .357 Magnum cartridges, which could have been purchased in a sporting-goods store a block away from the Prime Minister's office.

More troubling, it was still unclear whether the assassination was politically motivated. Police remained skeptical of claims by the West German terror group the Red Army Faction that it was responsible. Attention instead focused on activists from the obscure Kurdish Workers' Party, a group of political exiles from Turkey who, last August, vowed vengeance against the Swedish government for labeling them "terrorists."

Stepped-up security measures since the murder include two bodyguards at all times in public for acting Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, who has replaced Palme as Social Democratic Party leader and will probably be named Prime Minister next week. Carlsson will speak at funeral services for Palme, scheduled for March 15 at Stockholm's city hall. A panoply of world leaders, including Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar, will attend. In keeping with the slain Prime Minister's disdain for dictatorships, five countries--Chile, Afghanistan, Paraguay, Kampuchea and South Africa--were pointedly excluded from the ceremonies.

With reporting by John Kohan/Stockholm