STOCKHOLM, Oct 27: The man convicted and later acquitted of the 1986 murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, Christer Pettersson, confessed Saturday to the fatal shooting in a letter written to a tabloid newspaper.

The letter was written by Gert Fylking, a journalist who is a longstanding friend of Pettersson, and signed by the two men.

“Christer Pettersson is Olof Palme’s killer,” Fylking wrote in the letter, available on Expressen’s website.

“Christer Pettersson has told me: ‘bloody right I was the one who fired, but they’ll never convict me of it. The weapon is gone.’,” he wrote.

Palme was walking down a busy Stockholm street on the night of February 28, 1986 with his wife Lisbet when an unidentified assailant stepped out of the shadows and gunned him down.

In a witness line-up, Lisbet Palme later identified the gunman as Pettersson, a self-professed alcoholic and drug addict. He was convicted of the murder in 1989 but acquitted on appeal four months later.

Hours after Saturday’s letter was made public, Fylking voluntarily walked in to Swedish police headquarters, where he was interrogated. At the same time, Palme investigators were in talks with the head of the inquiry.

Criminal inspector Aake Roest said Pettersson, who is 54, would also be called in for questioning.

On Thursday, Lisbet Palme spoke out publicly about the killing for the first time, saying in a newspaper interview that she remained convinced she had correctly identified the killer, even though the Swedish courts chose not to believe her.

“I tried to keep the picture in my mind as clear as possible for myself for many years,” she said, recalling that she is a psychologist trained in observation.

In Saturday’s article, for which Fylking was paid 7,000 kronor (740 euros, 660 dollars) and of which 2,000 reportedly went to Pettersson, the pair wrote: “It must be very difficult for Lisbet Palme to both lose her husband and have her testimony rejected; to know that her husband’s murderer still walks free.”

In a November 1999 appearance on the TV3 commercial television channel, Fylking asked Pettersson if he killed Palme.

Pettersson replied that he didn’t think so, but that he could not be sure because he occasionally suffered from memory black-outs.—AFP