_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [17]
Swedish neo-Nazis have their own information network: the Anti-AFA (Anti-Anti-Fascist Action). In 1994, after the complaint lodged against Storm, the police seized a list of over two hundred antiracist activists. A few years later, extremists targeted Peter Karlsson and Katarina Larsson, two journalists at Aftonbladet—one of Sweden’s largest evening papers—who had once worked with us at Expo. At the time, they were investigating, among other things, the flourishing White Power music industry, which finances extremist groups throughout the world, and their efforts would later help lead to the bankruptcy of the racist Nordland music label in Sweden. Although they were allowed to officially conceal their identities in public records, their names, addresses, and detailed personal information about them were posted on the Internet in March 1999. Not long afterward, Aftonbladet published their reporters’ findings in an article revealing the names of neo-Nazis who had received training in weapons and explosives during their military service. Three months later, on June 28, Peter Karlsson and his eight-year-old son were the victims of a car bomb. When the little boy opened the car door, he was thrown back from the blast and only slightly injured, but his father sustained a serious spinal injury and remains severely handicapped.
On September 16 of that same year, trade unionist Bjorn Soderberg revealed that a neo-Nazi had been elected to the board of his local employees’ union. That same day and throughout the month of September, photos of more than twenty-five antiextremist activists, including that of Bjorn Soderberg, were requested from the passport services by the neo-Nazi newspaper Info 14. On October 12, Bjorn Soderberg was murdered, shot multiple times at his home in a Stockholm suburb. Among the possessions of one of the men implicated in his assassination, the police later found a list of more than a thousand names!
Events like these back up the threats directed at the magazine Millennium and underline the failings of the security measures provided by the state for any of the novel’s public citizens put at risk, failings that lead to the murders of Dag Svensson and Mia Bergman in The Girl Who Played with Fire. In fact, everything of this nature described in The Millennium Trilogy has happened at one time or another to a Swedish citizen, journalist, politician, public prosecutor, unionist, or policeman. Nothing was made up.
The culprits were quickly found and arrested on October 14, 1999. Shortly afterward, Stieg called one afternoon to tell me Peter Karlsson had just warned him that our passport photos, along with Soderberg’s, had been found among the evidence in the case, and that some of the suspects were still at large. Before hanging up, Stieg told me, “You mustn’t go home.” When the last member of the group was arrested on November 29, my friend Eleanor told me, relieved, “Now we can finally go out safely in public and stuff ourselves in a restaurant!”
Throughout that period, Stieg and I worried constantly about each other. Even before that, in a cafe I had always sat between him and the door as a kind of protective screen, but now we weren’t allowing ourselves to be seen together at all. My colleagues at work didn’t know the name of the man I lived with; I was always evasive, simply saying, “a journalist.” I never invited my coworkers home, only to public places. As for Stieg, without saying anything about it, he had set up a security network around me. This meant that if the police got a call reporting an incident on our street, they were authorized to send all available vehicles. I realized this the day there was a minor car accident outside our apartment and I heard