On September 10, 2003, four days before Swedes were due to vote on whether to adopt the euro, the country's foreign minister was attacked in central Stockholm. She died the next morning. Fourteen days later police arrested Mijailo Mijailovic, a 24-year-old Swede born to Serbian parents, and in January 2004 he admitted the attack while denying that he had meant to kill. Stockholm District Court convicted him of murder in March 2004 and sentenced him to life imprisonment.
The question that kept the case in court for the rest of that year was not whether he had done it but what should be done with him. Svea Court of Appeal found "massive support" for the view that he suffered from a psychiatric disorder and sent him to forensic psychiatric care instead of prison. On December 2, 2004, the Supreme Court of Sweden reversed that decision, held that the evidence did not show a serious mental disorder in the legal sense, and restored the life sentence. The judgment, published in the court's official reports, set out how Swedish courts are to weigh conflicting psychiatric evidence when deciding between prison and care. Mijailovic later gave up his Swedish citizenship and asked to serve his sentence in Serbia. Sweden refused, and in July 2025 he was still serving his life term there.
Anna Lindh was born in Stockholm in June 1957 and grew up in Enköping, northwest of the capital, where she finished secondary school in 1976. She joined the Social Democratic youth organization at 12. She took a law degree at Uppsala University in 1982 and the same year entered the Riksdag, Sweden's parliament, for the Social Democrats. In 1984 she became the first woman to chair the party's youth league, a post she gave up in 1990 to spend time with her first child.
From 1991 to 1994 she served on the Stockholm city government, responsible for leisure, culture and sport, and chaired the board of the Stockholm City Theatre; she started the city's successful bid to become European City of Culture for 1998. In 1994 she joined the cabinet of Ingvar Carlsson as minister for the environment, where she pressed for tougher environmental law and argued for what she called a green welfare state. In 1998 Prime Minister Göran Persson made her foreign minister, and she returned to the Riksdag the same year.
As foreign minister she became one of the best-known Swedish politicians abroad. She worked on Baltic Sea cooperation, disarmament and conflict prevention, and the conflict-prevention program adopted at the European Union meeting in Gothenburg in 2001 drew on Sweden's work under her. Human Rights Watch, mourning her in September 2003, singled out her defense of the International Criminal Court and her work on children in armed conflict, and her public criticism of abuses in the Middle East, Turkey, Chechnya and Tibet. She criticized the invasion of Iraq. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called her "one of those unapologetic multilateralists." In Sweden she was widely seen as a likely future prime minister, and in the late summer of 2003 she was one of the leading voices of the government's campaign for a yes vote in the euro referendum.
Mijailovic was born in Sweden in 1978 to parents from Serbia. By the time of the 2003 investigation he had a criminal record. In 1997, after a forensic psychiatric examination, he was convicted of aggravated assault and given probation with a requirement of psychiatric treatment. That examination found no sign of mental illness and, because of his youth and immaturity, did not diagnose a personality disorder, though it described him as being in great need of psychiatric and psychotherapeutic help. In the spring of 1999 a further psychiatric assessment noted suspected paranoid features without psychotic or depressive symptoms, and he was again given probation with a psychiatric care requirement. On April 9, 2001, he was convicted of unlawful threats and a further offense (ofredande), and the probation was extended to cover the new offenses. His record also included an offense under the arms law.
The Supreme Court later summarized his contact with psychiatry in the years before 2003. In March 2001 he sought psychiatric help, citing sleeplessness and saying he heard voices at night, and until early 2003 he attended a unit for the early treatment of psychosis in the Stockholm area, where no diagnosis of psychosis was made. At an outpatient visit on September 4, 2003, he was assessed as having personality problems that at times bordered on the psychotic.
The attack took place in central Stockholm on September 10. Prime Minister Göran Persson called it "an attack on our open society" and ordered stronger protection for the royal family, senior politicians and major public buildings. Swedish politicians other than the prime minister rarely had bodyguards at the time. The government decided that the euro referendum would go ahead as planned on Sunday, September 14, and Swedes voted against adopting the currency.
Police ran several lines of inquiry at once. A 35-year-old man was detained for about a week after prosecutors said there was "reasonable cause" to suspect him. On Wednesday, September 24, the chief prosecutor announced that he was no longer suspected, and the same day police arrested a second man on what the prosecutor described as a higher degree of suspicion. Police called the arrest undramatic.
The second man was Mijailovic. On Friday, September 26, 2003, Stockholm District Court ordered him detained, finding that he might flee and might obstruct the investigation if released, and gave prosecutors two more weeks to build a case. His name, kept confidential before the hearing, was made public at it; his defense counsel objected and said the case was far from a conviction. Evidence was presented only in closed session. Investigators later linked him to the scene by evidence, and he remained in custody through the fall while denying any involvement.
From the day of his arrest a physician who treated him in custody recorded that he spoke of delusions and of voices, and assessed him as acutely psychotic. Other physicians who saw him in custody over the following months noted no hallucinatory behavior, and one recorded a personality disorder. That disagreement among doctors, present from the first day, ran through every stage of the court case.
On Tuesday, January 6, 2004, at an interrogation held at his defense counsel's request, Mijailovic admitted the attack. The chief prosecutor confirmed the next day that he had confessed but gave no details. His counsel said the act had not been politically motivated, and when asked whether it had been random, answered, "You could say that." The confession was expected to shorten the trial; until then he had denied the charge.
The formal murder charge followed on Monday, January 12, 2004. The indictment accused him of murder under Chapter 3, Section 1 of the Swedish Penal Code, the offense of intentionally taking another person's life, which carried a sentence of ten years to life. Prosecutors argued that the attack had been planned; the defense said it had not.
The trial opened in Stockholm District Court on Wednesday, January 14, 2004, before a panel of a chief judge, a second professional judge and three lay judges. Mijailovic admitted that he had caused the minister's death but denied that he had intended to kill her, and argued in the alternative that if intent were found the offense should be classed as manslaughter (dråp) rather than murder. He told the court that the attack had been an impulse. The evidence phase closed on Monday, January 19, after three days of hearings; the prosecution asked for life imprisonment, and the defense asked that he be released.
The same day the court ordered a forensic psychiatric examination. The examination began on January 20 and the team's report was dated March 9, 2004. The team was unanimous. It found no objective sign of psychotic functioning, serious compulsion, confusion or a disturbed grasp of reality, and considered his symptoms consistent with a personality disorder of borderline type with narcissistic features. Its conclusion was that he had not committed the act under the influence of a serious mental disorder and did not suffer from one at the time of the examination.
On March 23, 2004, the district court convicted him of murder under Chapter 3, Section 1 and sentenced him to life imprisonment. It held that it was proved beyond reasonable doubt that he had intended to kill. On the psychiatric question it relied on the forensic examination, finding "all reason lacking to question the forensic psychiatric assessment," and it held that the offense had "a very high penal value" and that nothing in his personal circumstances could reduce the sentence. It ordered him to pay damages of 50,000 kronor, with interest, to each of the minister's husband and two sons.
Mijailovic appealed. Before the appeal hearing the Legal Council of the National Board of Health and Welfare, whose opinion the courts may seek on a forensic psychiatric examination, engaged a senior forensic psychiatrist to examine him again. From May 3 to 7, 2004, at a forensic psychiatric unit of the National Board of Forensic Medicine, that psychiatrist spent several hours a day with him while trained staff observed him continuously, and a psychologist carried out a separate assessment. The psychiatrist's opinion of June 3, 2004, concluded that his symptoms were best explained by a psychotic syndrome not otherwise specified; that the act had been committed under the influence of a serious mental disorder, which still persisted; that he needed psychiatric care involving deprivation of liberty; and that there was a risk he would reoffend seriously. On June 8 a majority of the Legal Council adopted that view. A minority of its members held to the diagnosis of the original forensic examination.
The Court of Appeal heard both teams of experts over three days in early July. Mijailovic declined to testify. The court sat as a presiding judge, two appeal judges and two lay judges.
On July 8, 2004, it upheld the murder conviction. It found that it had not been shown that he had seen the minister early enough to plan the attack, and so treated it as in some sense an impulsive act, but it held that he had at the least been wholly indifferent to whether she died, and it agreed with the district court that he had intended to kill. On the sanction it reached the opposite conclusion. "Taken together there is thus massive support for the assessment that M.M. suffers from a psychiatric disorder," the court wrote, and it found no reason not to base the sentence on the view of the Legal Council. It ruled that "the sanction for M.M. shall accordingly be determined as forensic psychiatric care," and that the care "shall be combined with special discharge review" under the Forensic Psychiatric Care Act of 1991. The court did not say how long he would be held.
The prosecution had until August 5 to appeal. The Prosecutor-General took the case to the Supreme Court and asked for a life sentence. Mijailovic also appealed against the murder conviction, asking to be acquitted of murder or, if intent were found, to be convicted of manslaughter. The minister's two sons, who had supported the prosecution at every stage, asked for higher damages.
On September 18, 2004, while still in custody, Mijailovic was certified for psychiatric care after a few days of reported sleeplessness, severe anxiety and commanding voices. He was moved to a forensic psychiatric clinic, where the examining physician found no open psychotic symptoms and judged the need for care doubtful. From September 22 he was held at a regional forensic psychiatric clinic in northern Sweden. Its chief physician found no signs of hallucination or thought disorder, and staff there observed no psychotic or compulsive symptoms at any point. In a written opinion of October 25, 2004, prepared at the Supreme Court's request, that physician concluded that Mijailovic's disorders did not amount to a serious mental disorder and questioned whether his reports of voices were meant to influence the psychiatric assessment. He told the Supreme Court that Mijailovic acted in order to obtain forensic psychiatric care, and that for a time Mijailovic had said he preferred a prison term so that he could serve it in Serbia.
The Supreme Court heard the case in November 2004. Six psychiatric experts gave evidence in closed session on November 11, four of them supporting a finding of mental illness and two supporting a prison sentence. Mijailovic again chose not to speak. The court sat as five justices, and the judgment, issued in Stockholm on December 2, 2004, under case number B 3454-04, records no dissent.
The court began by setting out the law. Under Chapter 30, Section 6 of the Penal Code, a court may not impose imprisonment for an offense committed under the influence of a serious mental disorder, and under Chapter 31, Section 3 a person with a serious mental disorder may be committed to forensic psychiatric care. It was for the court, not the doctors, to decide whether such care was needed, though it had to give great weight to the forensic psychiatric opinion and to compare conflicting opinions for itself. It said a court must not make its own medical assessment or attach a diagnosis, and must be very careful about letting the defendant's own behavior in court affect its view of his mental state.
On the standard of proof it laid down a rule of its own. Because the question concerned the choice of sanction rather than guilt, the criminal standard of proof did not apply, and neither did any presumption in favor of the defendant or the milder outcome. The court had instead to decide whether "predominant reasons" spoke for the disorder being serious, which it called a principle of preponderance. It rejected the Prosecutor-General's argument that the evidence had to show a serious disorder clearly, noting that when the law was passed parliament had urged courts to be cautious about imposing imprisonment where there was reason to suspect a serious mental disorder.
It then weighed the evidence. It accepted the account Mijailovic had given in the district court that the attack was an impulse, finding that the prosecution's evidence did not prove planning. It recorded his claim that when he saw the minister he heard voices telling him to attack, but not to kill, her, and held that even if that were so it did not exclude intent, since on his own account he had been fully aware that he was attacking her. It found it established that he had had a psychiatric disorder for several years, shown both by the recent examinations and by his well-documented history. On the central point, whether he really suffered delusions and hallucinations, it found some support in the evidence of the Legal Council's expert, the custody physician and the psychologist, and it gave weight to that expert's standing. Against them stood the original examination team and the clinic's chief physician, who had observed him far longer and whose conclusions agreed on the decisive points with the original examination. It noted too that before his arrest no clear indication of a serious mental disorder had been found in his history.
Its conclusion was this: "On an overall assessment the evidence cannot be considered to give sufficient support for the conclusion that predominant reasons indicate that MM's mental disorder at the time of the offense was or now is of a psychotic character." That he had a personality disorder was established, the court held, "but not that this is so severe that it constitutes or at the time of the offense constituted a serious mental disorder."
On guilt it found that he had been well aware he was attacking the minister, and that his conduct afterward supported rather than contradicted the view that the act was intentional. Although he said he had meant to injure and not to kill her, he must, even with his established disorder, have been aware of the substantial risk that she would die, and he had at the least been indifferent to whether that happened. The act was therefore intentional, there were no circumstances that made it less serious so as to class it as manslaughter, and he was to be convicted of murder.
On the sanction, the conditions for committing him to forensic psychiatric care were not met, and nothing prevented a sentence of imprisonment. "Even if MM as a result of his mental disorder may have had a reduced ability to control his actions," the court held, "the circumstances are such that the punishment, as the district court found, shall be set at life imprisonment."
The operative judgment reads: "Med ändring av hovrättens dom i ansvarsdelen dömer Högsta domstolen MM enligt 3 kap. 1 § brottsbalken för mord till fängelse på livstid." In English: "Amending the Court of Appeal's judgment on the question of liability, the Supreme Court sentences MM under Chapter 3, Section 1 of the Penal Code for murder to imprisonment for life." Because Mijailovic had accepted the sons' damages claim, the court raised the amount he had to pay each of them to 100,000 kronor with interest from September 10, 2003. It awarded his defense counsel 254,004 kronor from public funds and kept the confidentiality the Court of Appeal had ordered over most of the case file.
The three courts in this case applied the same statute and reached two different answers because Swedish law, as the Supreme Court set it out, makes the existence of a "serious mental disorder" the hinge between prison and psychiatric care. The Supreme Court explained that the term came from the 1992 legislation on compulsory psychiatric care and that its preparatory works counted first of all conditions of a psychotic character, with disturbed reality testing and symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations and confusion. Severe personality disorders with impulsive breakthroughs of a psychotic character could also qualify, judged by both the type and the degree of the disorder. A finding that the offense had been committed under such a disorder barred imprisonment altogether; a finding that the offender suffered from one at sentencing allowed the court to send him to care, and, where there was a risk of serious reoffending, to add special discharge review. The Court of Appeal used that last power. The Supreme Court, applying the same provisions, found that the threshold was not met.
The judgment was published in the Supreme Court's official law reports as NJA 2004 s. 702, under the heading "Question of whether there is sufficient evidence for a defendant to be considered to suffer from a serious mental disorder," and it is the case in which the court set out the preponderance test for that question.
Mijailovic gave up his Swedish citizenship in 2005, leaving him a citizen of Serbia only, and in February 2005 he asked to be moved to a prison in Serbia to serve his sentence there. At first he said that he did not feel safe among other inmates in Sweden.
On February 6, 2007, the Swedish Prison and Probation Service refused the request. "Serbia cannot communicate in advance what sentence Mijailovic would receive in Serbia," the agency said, and it concluded: "The Prison and Probation Service therefore does not find reasons to consent to a transferral." The longest prison term available in Serbia was 40 years. He appealed, and in May 2007 he withdrew the appeal. His counsel said he had accepted that he would serve his sentence in Sweden because he no longer believed a transfer was possible, that he "has ended up in a catch 22 situation," and that "Sweden and Serbia can never agree on this issue." His counsel described his time in custody up to then as largely free of trouble. No later transfer to Serbia followed.
In August 2011, eight years into his sentence, Mijailovic gave a long interview to a Swedish newspaper. He said that he had not planned the act and that it had been an impulse, and he denied that the minister's statements about the NATO bombing of Serbia had driven him. He also said that his claim to have heard voices had been a ploy to be found insane and avoid an ordinary prison sentence. He said that he could not be forgiven and that he accepted he would most likely never be released.
In December 2011 he was involved in an assault on a fellow inmate, and in October 2012 a district court convicted him of aggravated assault for that offense.
In July 2025 the Prison and Probation Service granted him a short, supervised leave of the kind meant to ease the harmful effects of long imprisonment. It was his first since 2003. The agency said in its decision that there were no security obstacles, and it required that the leave take place under supervision for security reasons. At that date he was serving his life sentence in Sweden.
The motive was never established. His defense counsel said in January 2004 that the act was not political, and the Court of Appeal found that no motive had emerged. Mijailovic later denied that the minister's views on the Kosovo war had moved him.
The courts did not accept that the attack was planned. The prosecution argued that it was; the Court of Appeal found it had not been shown that he saw her early enough to plan it, and the Supreme Court held that the evidence did not support the conclusion that the offense had been preceded by planning.
His mental state at the time of the offense divided the expert witnesses and the courts. The forensic psychiatric examination and the treating clinic found a personality disorder that did not amount to a serious mental disorder; the Legal Council's expert, a majority of the Legal Council and the Court of Appeal found a serious mental disorder. The Supreme Court's finding, that a personality disorder was proved but a serious mental disorder was not, is the final legal answer. His own 2011 statement that he had feigned the voices was made long after the verdict and was never tested in court.
No transfer to Serbia followed his request. The Prison and Probation Service refused his request in 2007, he withdrew his appeal, and in July 2025 he was still serving his sentence in Sweden.
1978: Mijailo Mijailovic is born in Sweden to Serbian parents.
1997: Convicted of aggravated assault; probation with psychiatric treatment.
Spring 1999: Second psychiatric assessment; probation with a psychiatric care requirement.
April 9, 2001: Convicted of unlawful threats and a further offense (ofredande).
September 10, 2003: The foreign minister is attacked in central Stockholm.
September 11, 2003: She dies.
September 14, 2003: Sweden votes against adopting the euro.
September 24, 2003: An earlier suspect is cleared; Mijailovic is arrested.
September 26, 2003: Stockholm District Court orders him detained.
January 6, 2004: He admits the attack at an interrogation.
January 12, 2004: Charged with murder.
January 14-19, 2004: Trial in Stockholm District Court; a forensic psychiatric examination is ordered on January 19.
March 9, 2004: The forensic psychiatric team reports no serious mental disorder.
March 23, 2004: Convicted of murder; life imprisonment.
June 3 and 8, 2004: The Legal Council's expert, and then a majority of the Legal Council, find a serious mental disorder.
July 8, 2004: Svea Court of Appeal upholds the murder conviction and orders forensic psychiatric care with special discharge review.
November 11, 2004: Six psychiatric experts give evidence to the Supreme Court in closed session.
December 2, 2004: The Supreme Court restores the life sentence (case B 3454-04, NJA 2004 s. 702).
February 2005: He asks to serve his sentence in Serbia; he renounces Swedish citizenship the same year.
February 6, 2007: The Prison and Probation Service refuses the transfer.
May 2007: He withdraws his appeal against the refusal.
August 2011: In a newspaper interview he says his claim of hearing voices was a ploy.
October 2012: Convicted of aggravated assault on a fellow inmate.
July 2025: Granted his first supervised short leave; still serving a life sentence in Sweden.