Swedish Suspect Called Too Radical for Rightist Group

The only suspect arrested in the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme was kicked out of an extreme right-wing political group because he was considered too radical, a spokesman for the organization said Tuesday.

The suspect, identified as Viktor Gunnarsson, 32, is described as a fanatical anti-communist who was briefly a member of the Swedish branch of the European Labor Party, party spokesman Michael Ericson said.

“He was a member for several months at the beginning of 1985,” Ericson said in a radio interview. “When it became clear that he had, to say the least, strange ideas that indicated cult tendencies, we distanced ourselves and broke off contact with him.”

However, Gunnar Falk, an attorney for the suspect, said earlier that the only organization Gunnarsson, described as a fundamentalist Christian, belonged to was a free-church sect.

Ericson said Gunnarsson approached European Labor Party workers in December, 1984, during a membership drive.

“Later on, in May, 1975, upon noticing some unbalanced features in this person, we cut all contact with him,” Ericson said in a statement.

The Swedish chapter of the European Labor Party is registered as a political party but won only 391 votes in the 1985 parliamentary election. Political observers say the group has only about 30 “hard-core” members.

The organization ran a hate campaign against Palme for more than 10 years, once describing him as “a raging beast, an ax murderer, the devil’s devil.”

Ericson said the European Labor Party’s main objection against Palme, a Socialist, was that “he tried to sell out Sweden to the Soviet Union.”

Chief public prosecutor K.G. Svensson urged a court Monday to charge Gunnarsson, who was was arrested last week, with murder in Palme’s Feb. 28 assassination, but it was not clear whether he was being held as the triggerman or as an accomplice. A court ruling is expected Thursday.

Svensson said witnesses saw the suspect near the scene of the murder after the killing.