STOCKHOLM, 24 March 2004 — Mijailo Mijailovic, who confessed to the fatal stabbing of popular Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison yesterday.
The sentence came more than six months after Lindh, one of the Scandinavian country’s most popular politicians, was attacked while shopping unguarded in an upscale department store.
In its decision, the court said that Mijailovic had been aware of what he was doing when he stabbed Lindh repeatedly, noting the severity and violence of the attack. “It was very much expected, it couldn’t have gone any other way,” Christopher Diesen, a law professor at Stockholm University, said of the sentence. “There were no extenuating circumstances.”
Lindh, 46, had been widely seen as a future prime minister. Her death plunged the country into a state of shock and raised the specter of the unsolved murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986.
The ruling against Mijailovic was expected after the Stockholm district court last week rejected a request by the defense to sentence him to psychiatric care.
Defense lawyer Peter Althin said he had not decided if the verdict and sentence would be appealed, but he has three weeks to do so. Until then, Mijailovic will remain in prison.
Althin had argued that Mijailovic was mentally unstable and under heavy medication during the attack.
Mijailovic, 25, said voices in his head told him to attack Lindh on Sept. 10 last year. He confessed to stabbing Lindh repeatedly but said he did not mean to kill her.
Prosecutors called for a murder conviction and life sentence when the trial ended last week at the Stockholm district court. The court rejected a request then by Althin to order a review of a court-ordered psychiatric screening that found Mijailovic was not suffering from a serious mental illness.
A Swede of Serbian origin, Mijailovic was arrested two weeks after the stabbing. He denied involvement for months, but confessed after being confronted with overwhelming evidence.
