Court rules that school dropout knew what he was doing when he stabbed popular foreign minister

The man who confessed to stabbing Sweden's popular foreign minister, Anna Lindh, in a Stockholm department store was sentenced to life imprisonment yesterday. Mijailo Mijailovic, aged 25, claimed that "voices in his head", including that of Jesus, told him to attack Ms Lindh, who had been thought likely to be the country's next prime minister. The killing, last September, cast a shadow over Sweden's euro referendum, which the social democratic government lost by a narrow margin three days later. Ms Lindh, aged 46 and a mother of two, had been a key figure in the Swedish campaign to join the European single currency and detectives had initially thought the killing was politically motivated. Mijailovic, the son of Serb immigrants and a school dropout, confessed to stabbing her repeatedly as she was shopping unguarded with a friend at the NK department store in the capital. But he insisted he had not meant to kill her.