Stieg Larsson, My Friend - Kurdo Baksi [24]
These tormentors have normal Swedish names, and often seem to be drunk, especially when they telephone. Sometimes they have threatening voices; sometimes they sound like Donald Duck. The worst are those with deep voices who sound like cold-blooded murderers at the other end of the line. They always phone from public call boxes or from withheld numbers.
Both Stieg and I noticed that until January 1999, murder threats came almost exclusively after normal office closing time. Friday and Saturday evenings were especially popular. But then routines and methods started to change. The more serious callers threatening murder started to ring at about 9.00 in the morning. Presumably in order to disturb our working day more effectively.
Naturally there were a lot of others besides Stieg and me who were threatened – not least on the hate-filled racist websites. Their favourite targets were journalists, politicians, police officers, Holocaust survivors, immigrants, homosexuals, antiracists, trade unionists and Swedes who had adopted non-white children.
As early as the beginning of the 1990s the neo-Nazis began to create their own secret police force. The force’s remit was to identify anti-racist enemies and collect personal registration numbers, passport photographs and addresses of residences and workplaces. Thanks to the lax Swedish passport laws, these secret policemen had no difficulty in collecting passport photographs – all they had to do was to request passport information about the citizens in whom they were interested. There was not even any need to provide identification when they requested these sensitive details.
This negative aspect of the transparency principle led to several people losing their lives. On 12 October, 1999, the young trade unionist Björn Söderberg was murdered outside his flat in Sätra in southern Stockholm. This was the first time that a trade union activist had been murdered in Sweden. It is also a clear example of the price of standing up for one’s beliefs. Söderberg was a syndicalist who refused to listen to racist music at his workplace and succeeded in getting a known neo-Nazi sacked. He would not accept the election of a neo-Nazi to the regional committee of the Commerce Employees’ Association in Stockholm. This last stand was the equivalent of signing his own death warrant. Certain reports claimed that the Swedish police were keeping watch on the neo-Nazis patrolling outside his home.
Three days after Söderberg’s murder, Stieg burst into Svartvitt’s office, gasping for breath. The first thing I noticed was that it was 9.00 in the morning. I soon realized why he was so upset. Unlike me, who receives his threatening letters in a post office box, Stieg had found his lying on the mat in his front hall.
“We have a lot to do,” he said, sitting down. “First of all we need to look into how the police handled the build-up to the murder of Björn Söderberg. It’s a scandal.”
I made him a white coffee and watched him slump back in the light brown armchair, more or less exhausted.
“I don’t understand,” he said with a sigh, “why Söderberg received no practical advice from the police about how to go about your daily life when you’ve received murder threats. He ought to have known that he couldn’t just open the door without first checking who had rung the bell.”
“Nor was he allocated a police mentor after the neo-Nazis had