A Serbian man has confessed to the killing of Anna Lindh, the Swedish foreign minister who died after being stabbed in a Stockholm department store last September.

Mijailo Mijailovic, 25, ended months of stubborn denial after reading volumes of forensic evidence linking him to the murder.

The announcement came as a relief to Sweden: it means that a trial can go ahead, perhaps as early as this month, and a traumatic chapter in one of Europe’s most orderly and placid societies can be quickly closed.

Mr Mijailovic, who has a Swedish passport, comes from a family of Serbs and Montenegrins that has worked in Sweden for three generations.

His grandfather, Zivota, emigrated from Serbia to Sweden in 1970, returning only in 1996 to his village of Pruzatovac, 40km south of Belgrade.

"Swedes were good to us - they gave us jobs and we owe them almost everything we have," he said. "I’m so ashamed I could just die."

Mr Mijailovic’s father also commuted between the family home - largely built from earnings in Sweden - and Stockholm.

Some family friends have claimed the Mijailovic clan was furious at Mrs Lindh’s support for the American-led bombing raids on Serbia during the Kosovo conflict of 1999.

But both the prosecution and the defence teams have ruled out a political motive for the assassination. "There was no political motive whatsoever and no planning," said Peter Althin, Mr Mijailovic’s defence lawyer.

Mr Mijailovic, who has undergone several psychiatric examinations since his arrest in September, has a record of personal violence. In 1997 he stabbed his father in the back and behind the ear with a kitchen knife, apparently to break up an argument between his parents.

According Swedish court documents he has been previously convicted of assault, possession of a gun and making threatening phone calls. All the convictions led to probation or suspended sentences. He was reportedly obsessed by famous people.

Swedish newspapers have reported that he was released from a psychiatric clinic five days before the attack on Ms Lindh. If so, the country’s psychiatric care will also come under scrutiny.

There have been several recent cases of psychiatric patents, released into family care, running amok. One released patient last year deliberately rammed his car into dozens of pedestrians in the Old Town district of Stockholm.

If convicted, Mr Mijailovic faces a life sentence, though in practice nobody serves more than about 14 years in Sweden.

The trial could stir up a resentments of immigrants that bubbling only just below the surface.

As Sweden’s proud social welfare system is battered by economic downturn, so Swedes have increasingly questioned whether their society should be so open to foreigners.