Bertil Wedin

Bertil Wedin (born 21 November 1940) is a former Swedish secret service agent. He was accused in an English court, but acquitted of the 1982 burglary of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) office in London. In 1996, Wedin was named as the killer of Sweden's premier, Olof Palme. His accuser, Peter Caselton – who with eight others including Craig Williamson had applied for amnesty from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the March 1982 bombing of the ANC office in London – was allegedly a member of an apartheid South Africa assassination squad. Wedin denied killing Palme. He was also suspected of bombing the ANC Stockholm office in 1986.

Credibility deficit

Bertil Wedin said he heard the news a few days later. "On March 1, 1986, I was in Kyrenia watching videotapes when I heard of Palme's death from a BBC broadcast. I was shocked," Wedin said. "Of course I did not kill him." Wedin then detailed his own theory: that the real assassins planned to frame him as the killer, and then murder him. "According to my own information not one person, Olof Palme, but two people - him and me - were the targets of the assassins. The killers thought that I would be in Stockholm that day. They were there to kill us both the same day so I would be blamed as Palme's assassin, the files would be shelved and the case closed."

Wedin participated in an interview with Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency correspondent Nadire Mater, and a group of Swedish journalists, in Kyrenia aka Girne, in Turkish-held Northern Cyprus early in October 1996. The IPS interview followed a Swedish TV Tuesday report that Wedin was about to be identified as Palme's murderer by Eugene De Kock, the former head of a covert South African police unit notorious for killing and torturing anti-apartheid activists. Already convicted of six murders and 83 lesser crimes, De Kock told the Supreme Court in Pretoria that he would expose the assassin as "a Swedish agent now living on a Mediterranean island". Then on Wednesday, the Expressen newspaper published an interview with an unidentified ex-member of the South African secret police (thought to have been Peter Caselton, who was run over and killed by a truck a few weeks later) who claimed that if Palme's murder had been ordered by the apartheid regime, then it was carried out by Wedin. Throughout the interview Wedin appeared relaxed. He even quipped: "I do not know why De Kock implicates me. He must be crazy." Wedin said he had his "own suspicions" as to who really killed Palme, who ordered the killing and why they had never been caught. "But I can't elaborate on them - for then I would face a real threat," he said.

Cold Turkey

On the same day as the Expressen article, the daily Dagens Nyheter claimed that Wedin had faked a Palme murder link with the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The PKK had been battling against Ankara's security forces in Turkey since 1984. Wedin allegedly fed the PKK link to a journalist on the Turkish daily Hurriyet and a frantic police sweep of PKK sympathisers in Sweden then followed, but to no avail. Wedin denied any part in promoting the PKK link so as to divert the police investigation from pursuing a South African lead.

The South African connection

Wedin accepted in his 1996 interview with IPS that he had served as an agent of the Swedish secret service (SÄPO), but denied ever having been a US, South African or Turkish (MIT) agent. However, he seemed to have forgotten that he was arrested in 1982, and accused of a burglary that took place in the Pan Africanist Congress office in London. Wedin was eventually acquitted of the offence by an English court but not before having admitted that he was working for - and being paid by - South African intelligence, and that he had been recruited by South African superspy Craig Williamson. He was also thought to be involved in the bombing of the ANC's London office on March 14, 1982, since he and Peter Caselton, one of nine people - including Williamson - granted amnesty by the TRC for this bombing , hastily left London the same day for Cyprus. It is believed that, contrary to the TRC's full disclosure rule, Williamson did not reveal in his application that the purpose of this bombing was to kill the then ANC president, Oliver Tambo. Wedin is also suspected of bombing the ANC office in Stockholm in 1986.

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