A SERBIAN man has confessed to killing 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 with the murder.

Mijailovic, who has a Swedish passport, comes from a family of Serbs and Montenegrins that has worked in Sweden for three generations. Some friends claimed that the Mijailovics were furious at Ms Lindh’s support for the American-led bombing raids on Serbia during the Kosovo conflict of 1999, but prosecution and defence teams have ruled out a political motive for the killing. Peter Althin, Mijailovic’s defence lawyer, said: “There was no political motive whatsoever and no planning.”

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

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

If convicted, Mijailovic faces a life sentence, although in practice no one serves more than about 14 years in Sweden.

Swedish newspapers have reported that he was released from a psychiatric clinic five days before the attack on Ms Lindh.

Zivota Mijailovic, his grandfather, emigrated from Serbia to Sweden in 1970, returning only in 1996 to his village of Pruzatovac, 40km (25 miles) south of Belgrade. He said: “Swedes were good to us. They gave us jobs and we owe them almost everything we have. I’m so ashamed I could just die.”

Mijailovic’s father also commuted between the family home, largely built from earnings in Sweden, and Stockholm. The trial could stir up resentment of immigrants. As Sweden’s proud social welfare system is battered by economic downturn, Swedes have questioned whether their society should be so open to foreigners.

Yet many Swedes will be relieved that Mijailovic is of foreign origin. Initially police arrested a Swedish suspect after the stabbing. The man was a drifter who moved between overlapping circles in the capital — football hooligans, the far Right, the high-spending disco crowd and even the fringes of the Royal Family. The country was confronted with the unacceptable face of modern Sweden — one that rejected the traditional values of hard work and modest living. The man, controversially identified and publicly pilloried, was released and Mijailovic was picked up the same day.

The police were under pressure to catch Ms Lindh’s killer, having failed to charge anyone with the killing of Olaf Palme, the Prime Minister, in 1986.

Swedish ministers are now using bodyguards more rigorously, but with reluctance. Neither they, nor the voters, like the idea of politicians being separated from society.

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