Did Apartheid Kill Olof Palme?

PRETORIA, South Africa: The testimony of a man convicted of right-wing political murders in South Africa may solve a notorious, nine-year-old murder mystery in Scandinavia. In 1986, Swedish prime minister and anti-apartheid activist Olof Palme was shot in the back by an unknown gunman. Testifying Thursday in an attempt to mitigate his sentence on murder and robberies, Eugene De Kock said former South African spy Craig Williamson had led an operation to assassinate Palme. The murdered Swede had supported the African National Congress throughout the 1960s and 1970s and was one of the foremost supporters of the anti-apartheid sanctions campaign. Swedish authorities say they had privately suspected South African involvement in Palme's death since 1987, but refused to comment further. Until his arrest, De Kock, who describes himself as South Africa's foremost assassin, ran the Vlakplaas, a shadowy vigilante group created by the apartheid-era South African government to fight the ANC with whatever tactics it chose. He and Williamson were contemporaries. "The problem is that a lot of what De Kock says is third-person hearsay," says TIME Southern Africa bureau chief Peter Hawthorne. "De Kock is trying to ease his sentence by providing information, and so people are skeptical about his testimony. De Kock is a monstrous, truly evil man who is trying to make as many waves as he can as he faces life imprisonment." Whether his revelation about Palme's death is true or false, says Hawthorne, his testimony and conviction will undoubtedly be part of a catharsis as South Africa copes with the legacy of apartheid. -->