STOCKHOLM, April 1 (AFP) Swedish police were scheduled in Turkey Monday to
 question imprisoned Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, who has accused his former wife of
 involvement in the 1986 slaying of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.

 The officers will interview the head of the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) on the
 Turkish prison island Imarali where he has been held since last year, the Swedish news agency
 TT said.

 After dodging Turkish authorities, Ocalan was captured in Kenya in an undercover operation and
 brought back to Turkey in 1999 to face trial for leading an armed campaign for self-rule in
 southeast Anatolia.

 He was sentenced to death for treason in June 1999, but his execution was put on hold by
 Ankara in January last year to allow the European Court of Human Rights to rule on his
 complaints against his arrest.

 During his trial, Ocalan accused a dissident Kurdish movement led by his ex-wife, Kesire
 Yildirim, of having liquidated Palme in order to discredit the PKK.

 Ocalan claimed that the breakaway group had wished to prevent creating a climate favouring a
 peaceful solution to the Kurdish question. Palme could have initiated such a climate.

 Kurdish exiles have been present in Sweden for a number of years. Swedish authorities refused
 entry to Ocalan himself at the end of the 1980s.

 Before Palme's assassination on a Stockholm street in 1986, Swedish intelligence had been
 keeping PKK exiles under surveillance, suspecting them of plotting an assassination attempt.

 A year after Palme's death, police arrested some 20 Kurds as part of their enquiries but later
 rleeased them for lack of evidence.

 The trail was taken up again in 1999 by the Turkish newspaper Sabah.

 It quoted a former PKK leader, Semdin Sakik, as saying that after Turkish security forces
 captured himm his organisation had killed Palme because at the time Sweden was plannning to
 expel eight PKK activists.

 These statements were officially denied by the Stockholm-based offices of the PKK's political
 arm.

 Investigators into the Palme assassination have followed up thousands of leads over the past 15
 years, but the crime remains unresolved to this day.

 Palme was gunned down on the evening of February 28, 1986, by an unidentified assailant as
 he walked down a busy Stockholm street with his wife. The weapon, a .357 Magnum revolver,
 was never recovered.

 The statute of limitations on the murder is 25 years, or 2011. There is a 50-million-kronor (4.8
 million dollar, 5.5 million euro) reward for information leading to the arrest of Palme's killer.
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The Kurdistan Observer
www.kurdistanobserver.com