Friend to testify about murder of Anna Lindh

"I heard the voices come, saying that I should attack her... I couldn't resist the voices... It happened so quickly. I took out the knife, then I attacked her. I don't know how many times I stabbed."

Mijailo Mijailovic, accused of murdering former Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh

Prosecutors in the Anna Lindh murder trial were to call their star witness yesterday, a friend of Sweden's popular foreign minister who was with her when she was fatally stabbed.

Eva Franchell, a former press secretary to Lindh, is expected to tell the court her version of events as the prosecution aims to prove that 25-year-old Mijailo Mijailovic's brutal attack on Lindh at a crowded Stockholm department store on Sept. 10 was meant to kill.

A Swede born to Serbian parents, Mijailovic admitted on the opening day of his trial on Wednesday that he stabbed Lindh, but insisted that he didn't mean to kill her. He said that he was sleep-deprived, on a heavy cocktail of prescription drugs, and hearing voices in his head that ordered him to attack her.

"I heard the voices come, saying that I should attack her... I couldn't resist the voices," he said, saying the voices were speaking to him in his mother tongue, Serbo-Croat.

"It happened so quickly. I took out the knife, then I attacked her. I don't know how many times I stabbed," he said, adding that he "did not aim" for her vital organs.

He insisted that the attack was not politically motivated, and that he had "nothing personal against Anna Lindh." He said he had followed news reports about Lindh fighting for her life in hospital in the ensuing hours and recalled "hoping that she would survive."

The defense has argued that Mijailovic's actions were those of a panicked man who was losing his grip on reality, probably because of wrongly prescribed medication. He has a history of mental instability, and was ordered by a court to undergo psychiatric care after stabbing his father with a kitchen knife in 1996 at the age of 17.

Lindh, who had been tipped to become her country's prime minister, died the day after receiving the repeated stab wounds to her abdomen, arms and chest. She was 46 and left two young children.

Her death sent shockwaves through Sweden and the world and rekindled memories of the still unsolved 1986 assassination of the country's prime minister Olof Palme.

Prosecutors have rejected Mijailovic's claim that he didn't mean to kill Lindh, and have defended the murder charge, which implies intent.

They have argued that Mijailovic carefully and rationally planned the attack, that he scouted out Lindh at the store, charged straight for her with a knife, and then immediately fled the store and into a hair salon to try to get his head shaved to change his appearance.

According to transcripts from police interrogations, Franchell told investigators that Mijailovic ploughed through the crowd of shoppers and specifically sought out Lindh.

"The only thing I'm completely sure of... is that he was out to attack Anna," Franchell said.

The prosecution was also expected to call a DNA expert from Britain's Forensic Science Service in Birmingham yesterday, whose help Swedish police sought to recover small amounts of DNA and fingerprints on the murder weapon which were later found to match those of Mijailovic.

Finally, a forensics expert was due to testify about the force of the blows inflicted on Lindh, again in the prosecution's bid to prove intent.

Whether Mijailovic meant to kill Lindh is crucial at the trial, because the prosecution, certain of its case, has brought only murder charges, without providing for a manslaughter charge as a fallback option.

"The charge only covers intent to kill," Mijailovic's lawyer Peter Althin said.

"If [the prosecutors] maintain that charge and the court concludes that he had no intent to kill, then he can't be convicted of anything... Then he'll be set free," he said.

The trial is scheduled to conclude after a third day of proceedings on Monday. Before pronouncing its verdict, the court is expected to order a month-long psychiatric examination of Mijailovic.