The Annals of Unsolved Crime by Edward Jay Epstein Read Free Book Online Page A

arrested a number of Kurdish refugees in Stockholm. As there was no evidence placing them at the scene of the crime, and because most of them had alibis, they were released. Fifteen years later, Kurdish PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was questioned by Swedish investigators in prison in Turkey, but he denied any Kurdish involvement.
    Finally, there is the theory that the South African intelligence service killed Palme because he was about to make a deal with its archenemy, the outlawed African National Congress. This theory grew out of the testimony of Eugene de Kock in 1996 to the South African Supreme Court in Pretoria. De Kock, a former high-ranking South African police officer during the apartheid era, said that Craig Williamson, a former police colleague, had organized the plot and hired Anthony White, a former Rhodesian Selous Scout, as the triggerman. The code name for the covert action, according to de Kock, was Operation Longreach.
    My assessment is that the assassin was not a spur-of-the-moment amateur. All the evidence points to a professional killer who had carefully stalked his prey and then chose a time and place in which there were no witnesses. He had also planned to kill Lisbet Palme. If she had not survived, no one would have known what had happened. The fact that the weapon was not found, and that the bullets were never traced, are also themarks of a professional hitman. It is also likely he had the false documentation and other support necessary to escape Sweden. We have such a candidate in “Operation Longreach.” So I find plausible Eugene de Kock’s testimony to the South African Supreme Court that a South African covert-action unit sent a professional assassin to kill Palme. It had a motive in Palme’s dealings with the African National Congress. It had the means to get an assassin in and out of Sweden under a false identity. And it had an opportunity in Palme’s lack of security. Since de Kock had been granted immunity and had no obvious reason to lie, I believe that Palme was killed by an assassin dispatched from South Africa.
    The lesson of this case is that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, which Sherlock Holmes famously referred to as “the dog that did not bark in the night-time” in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “Silver Blaze.” After the Palme murder, Swedish police searched high and low for the murder weapon for more than a quarter century without success, including tracking down all the reported stolen Magnum revolvers and test-firing more than 400 other weapons. The absence of a weapon, as well as the absence of any clues at the crime scene, is part of the modus operandi of a professional hitman, who, if successful in his work, commits unsolved crimes.

CHAPTER 5
THE ANTHRAX ATTACK ON AMERICA
    The anthrax attack in September 2001 was an act of biological warfare involving the first use of a weapon of mass destruction. It came less than three weeks after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Accompanying the lethal biological agent were photocopies of two handwritten notes dated 09/11/2001. The first note was sent along with anthrax to NBC and to the New York Post . The note read: “THIS IS NEXT. TAKE PENACILIN [sic] NOW. DEATH TO AMERICA DEATH TO ISRAEL ALLAH IS GREAT.” The second note was sent to U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, and to Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. This note read: “YOU CANNOT STOP US. WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX. YOU DIE NOW. ARE YOU AFRAID. DEATH TO AMERICA DEATH TO ISRAEL ALLAH IS GREAT.” The anthrax in the envelopes was the most virulent of all anthrax, the deadly Ames strain. Even though the secret technology for turning anthrax spores, which tend to clump together, into an aerosol remains a closely guarded state secret, the letters contained a powdered anthrax that, once they were opened, transformed into a cloud of billions of spores of anthrax. This