Hitman jailed for Scottish murder bid claims spy chiefs set up Palme killing

• Glen Lyon Road, Kirkcaldy, scene of the near-fatal shooting

The assassination plot, worthy of the pages of a thriller novel, unfolds across Europe, from Belgrade to Zagreb to Sweden - and even takes in the Fife towns of Kirkcaldy and Dunfermline.

But investigators in Germany insist their conclusions are no work of fiction and that the word of a former member of a murder team from the Balkans is valid.

Yugoslav assassin Vinko Sindicic is the informant who provided a crucial piece of evidence in the hunt for those responsible for the 1986 murder, according to German police sources.

The Germans believe that Sindicic, a former member of a Yugoslav hit-squad, has provided a crucial tip.

A report, published this week in the German news magazine Focus, centres on previously unreleased testimony from him.

Sindicic now claims that a Yugoslav secret service team, led by a man identified as Ivo D, killed Mr Palme and planned to pin the killing on right-wing Croatian separatists.

The 67-year-old is a former Yugoslav secret service agent. In 1988 he attempted to murder Croat dissident, Nikola Stedul, in Kirkcaldy for "speaking out" against Yugoslav Communism.

Sindicic entered Britain with a Swiss passport, apparently appropriated from a Zurich businessman who died while working in Zagreb.

The passport was used by Sindicic to hire a car which he drove to Kirkcaldy. In the car, Sindicic waited for Stedul with a gun and silencer provided by Yugoslav diplomats in Scotland.

• Assassination attempt pulled quiet Fife street into spy plot

Stedul, walking his dog that morning, was shot at four times by Sindicic.

Bullets hit him in the mouth, elbow and hip. Afraid of Stedul's barking dog, Sindicic failed to fire a fatal shot and instead made his getaway. Caught soon afterwards at Heathrow Airport, he was jailed for 15 years by the High Court in Dunfermline.

Now he is speaking out about the killing of former Swedish prime minister Mr Palme, claiming the assassination was commissioned by his Belgrade spy chiefs who wanted to pin the death on Croatian separatists.

Sindicic said: "Thus, they reasoned, the separatists, largely nationalists and right wing, would be discredited in the eyes of the rest of the world."

The policy of killing enemies abroad was a diktat of the former Communist leader of Yugoslavia, Josip Tito.However, it is understood that after he died in 1980, and before the implosion of the state, the practice continued.

Mr Palme was shot on the evening of 28 February, 1986, in Sveavgen in central Stockholm after going to the cinema.

To date, despite exhaustive and expensive inquiries, no-one has ever been brought to book for his murder, nor has the weapon - a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum - ever been found.

Previous testimony from Sindicic helped German authorities solve a case involving the 1983 killing of a Yugoslav dissident in Munich - part of the reason officers hold such store with his claims about Mr Palme.

Sindicic, who tried to buy a Spanish island for 3.1 million eight years ago, says Ivo D is now 65 and lives in Zagreb.

At the time of the assassination, Ivo D was living in Hamburg. The murder weapon arrived from America and was put on a ship to Sweden where the assassin collected it for the "hit", according to Sindicic.

Stig Edqvist, the head of the Swedish police unit still working on Mr Palme's killing, said that his squad had been aware of the information "for some time", but added that anything new in the Focus report that would "make us re-think things" would be followed up.

Originally the killing of Mr Palme was blamed on a Swedish extremist, but the suspect was soon cleared. He later emigrated to the US and was himself murdered. Kurdish exiles were also blamed, but nothing conclusive was found.

Mr Palme, a left-wing Social Democrat politician, was a fierce opponent of the South African apartheid regime and at least one trail led towards the city of Johannesburg.

The motive was apparently to stop secret Swedish government payments to the banned African National Congress.

Others claimed that the prime minister had been targeted by men acting on behalf of an arms industry cartel.

The Baader-Meinhof terrorist group in Germany also briefly claimed responsibility.

Christer Pettersson, a brain-damaged Swedish petty criminal, was initially convicted for the killing but the sentence was quashed by the appeal court.

The Yugoslav connection appears to be the most plausible, according to experts writing in Focus magazine.

Mr Palme was killed after he had given his bodyguards the night off. As he strolled through Stockholm with his wife, a man approached them from behind and shot them both using a Smith & Wesson handgun.

He was rushed to hospital and pronounced dead shortly afterwards. His wife survived.