The American streaming giant Netflix is the target of a defamation complaint in Sweden against its new series devoted to the main suspect in the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986, we learned from the authorities on Tuesday.
Consultant at the head office of the insurance company Skandia, next to the scene of the murder, Stig Engström was officially designated last year as presumed guilty by the Swedish courts, after 35 years of an investigation which has failed. never succeeded in unraveling with certainty the most famous crime in Swedish history.
Also known by the nickname “the man from Skandia”, this politically hostile publicist to Olof Palme died in 2000, without ever having been seriously worried by investigators.
His direct implication in the Netflix series The Improbable Assassin of Olof Palme is a “crystal clear defamation case,” says the complaint, a copy of which was sent to AFP by the Chancellery of Justice, the authority in charge of the case.
The complainant, whose identity is confidential, accuses Netflix in particular of having introduced into its scenario elements “completely unfounded in the facts as they are known”, and not appearing in the investigative book of journalist Thomas Pettersson , from which the series is inspired.
Guardian figure of social democracy and ardent defender of the Third World, Olof Palme was shot dead at the end of the evening on a boulevard in central Stockholm in 1986, when he was returning from the cinema with his wife, without a bodyguard.
His murderer had shot him in the back, before fleeing the scene and leaving the Prime Minister to agonize on the sidewalk.
Mr. Engström had presented himself as a witness at the outset of the investigation.
In the Netflix series, he is presented as having shot Mr. Palme. We then follow his maneuvers to clear the crime by appearing to investigators and the media as a witness who simply left work late.
A text at the end of each episode recalls that the work is a fiction inspired by Mr. Pettersson’s book and that Mr. Engström has not been proven to be the murderer.
If it is a great success, the series has been the subject of criticism in Sweden.
Mr Engström’s ex-wife Margareta called it a “personal attack” that the show suggested that she understood her husband was the murderer.
In an interview with public television SVT, however, she ruled out filing a complaint.