'I know who killed Palme': Eva Rausing

Billionairess Eva Rausing claimed to know who killed Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. Rausing, who died last month, made the claims in emails to an expert on the murder, adding she feared for her life.

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Rausing first told journalist Gunnar Wall of her suspiciosn in an email in June 2011. The email had as its subject line “I know who killed Olof Palme”.

“Of course I was surprised and a bit suspicious at first,” Wall told daily Dagens Nyheter (DN).

On Tuesday the correspondence between Wall and Rausing was handed over to the deputy chief prosecutor Kerstin Skarp, according to the paper.

“My name is Eva Rausing and I am married to Hans K Rausing and I recently found out from my husband, whom I have been married to for 20 years, that XX was behind the murder of Olof Palme. My husband had found out by coincidence many years ago and it affected him very, very badly. I think I know where the murder weapon is hidden”, Rausing wrote according to DN.

Eva Rausing told Wall that the motive for Palme’s death had been strictly financial. The businessman who was behind the deed had thought that “Palme was a threat to his business and he didn’t want to lose it”.

She also said she feared the man greatly.

“I am afraid of XX. He is not a good man but I would never tell any of this if it wasn’t true.”

Wall and Rausing exchanged several more emails over the course of three weeks before she ceased to answer.

Although the emails show that Rausing wavered in her belief that it was the businessman who was behind the murder of Palme, and despite admitting that some of what she wrote in her emails came from “visions” she had had, she kept referring to information she had been given by her husband.

"Don´t forget to investigate if I should suddenly die! Just joking I hope," Rausing wrote to Wall in one of her later emails.

Wall told DN that he didn’t really take seriously Rausing’s fear that she could be in danger because of what she knew about Palme’s murder.

“Her information about a Swedish businessman wasn’t completely incredible as Palme did have some rather fierce antagonists in private industry. At the same time her theory wasn’t any more credible than all the other similar tips I have received over the years, and in the end the whole thing was just left to lie while I was busy with something else,” Wall told DN.

“When I heard she had died one year later and that police were suspicious that she might have been murdered, I asked myself if I had underestimated her worry and her information.”

The autopsy however showed that Rausing died of an overdose and her long lasting drug addiction was no secret, but finding her dead, husband Hans Kristian had hidden her body under a heap of clothes in a sealed room for 57 days, carrying on like normal.

She was finally buried in New York on August 9th and her husband pleaded guilty to the charges of preventing the burial of his wife, was given a suspended sentence, and is currently being treated in a rehab clinic in London.

When British police searched Eva Rausing’s computer they found information regarding Swedish Prime Minister Palme’s unsolved murder from 1986.

There are indications that Eva Rausing tried to establish contact with the Palme group as early as 2010, but that they then did not find her story credible, according to the paper.

Last week Swedish media reported how uncorroborated sources had revealed that the Palme group in Sweden had decided to question Hans Kristian Rausing.

Deputy Chief Prosecutor Skarp however, does not want to disclose too many details about the information from Eva Rausing.

“We have had some information from the UK and she did contact the group previously, but I don’t want to elaborate on what we are focussing on next,” Skarp told newspaper Aftonbladet.

Olof Palme, prime minister and leader of the Social Democratic party, was gunned down by an unapprehended assailant on a street in Stockholm in February 1986. His murder has not yet been solved.

The Local/rm
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