Two Tickets to the Cinema: Thirty-Four Years After a Prime Minister Was Shot on a Public Street

2026-09-08 · Case Files · 11 min read

Olof Palme telephoned his son on the evening of 28 February 1986 and asked whether there were still tickets for the film.

He was fifty-nine years old and the Prime Minister of Sweden. His security detail had been told earlier that day that he would not need them that evening - a decision he made regularly, and one that his officers had stopped arguing with, because he considered it important that a Swedish prime minister should be able to walk through his own capital without an escort. It was a small country, and he thought it should stay that way.

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