STOCKHOLM, Aug 5 (AFP) - Sweden's chief prosecutor said on Thursday that he had appealed the sentence passed on the killer of foreign minister Anna Lindh.
Prosecutor General Fredrik Wersaell wants the Supreme Court to give Mijailo Mijailovic, convicted of stabbing Lindh while she was shopping in a Stockholm department store on September 10, a sentence of life in prison rather than psychiatric care.
Lindh died of her injuries on September 11, sending Sweden into a state of shock and bringing back painful memories of the still-unsolved 1986 assassination of prime minister Olof Palme.
Mijailovic was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life by a lower court in March this year. But while the Svea Court of Appeals last month upheld the murder conviction it overturned the life sentence, ordering instead that he receive psychiatric care.
"The appeals court verdict resolved the question of guilt. Mijailo Mijailovic shall according to that ruling be convicted of murder. This element of the ruling is not being appealed. This appeal only relates to the consequences," Wersaell said in a statement.
The appeals court said Mijailovic "committed the crime under the influence of a serious psychiatric disorder and he still suffers from this disorder". It cited experts who concluded that he suffered from an "unspecified psychotic syndrome".
According to Wersaell, however, the psychiatric expertise that that ruling was based on did not irrefutably show that Mijailovic had been suffering from a serious mental illness when he attacked Lindh or that he was still suffering from such an illness.
"He should therefore be sentenced to prison," he said.
An order for psychiatric care in Sweden can run anywhere from six months to 20 years as the convict is released when deemed healthy, while a life sentence usually means about 15 years in prison.
The appeals court specified however in its ruling that Mijailovic could only be released from psychiatric care after a review by a county administrative court, at which the public prosecutor is entitled to a say.
Mijailovic, who has been in and out of psychiatric care since he attacked his father with a kitchen knife when he was 17, has testified that voices in his head told him to attack the 46-year-old mother of two, adding that he was sleep-deprived and doped up on several anti-depressants when he heard the voices. He has never provided any other motive for the killing.