Defendant says he never meant to kill Lindh

The confessed killer of Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh said at the start of his trial yesterday he had not meant to kill but was unable to resist inner voices urging him to stab.

Mijailo Mijailovic, 25, looked calm during most of his cross-examination but raised his voice when a prosecutor repeatedly asked him about his movements inside the department store where he attacked Lindh on September 10.

The prosecutor said Mijailovic had seen Lindh from afar in the downtown Stockholm store and planned the murder for some minutes. But Mijailovic said he acted on impulse and had nothing personal against Lindh, a 46-year-old mother of two.

"I was on my way out but I took a wrong turn. I saw Anna Lindh. Then the voices came and said I should attack her," Mijailovic told the court. "I could not resist the voices."

"I don't remember the actual attack, it went so quickly." In a confession last week, he said the voices had spoken to him in the language of his parents from former Yugoslavia and he believed it was the voice of Jesus. Asked what he felt after he heard Lindh had died, Mijailovic said: "Immensely sad.... She was a fine person and it wasn't supposed to go that way."

Defence lawyer Peter Althin said Mijailovic, a high school dropout who has had no steady job, could go free if the court accepted that he had no intention to kill.

Citing Mijailovic's confession, surveillance camera recordings and witness accounts from the crime scene as well as forensic evidence, prosecutor Agneta Blidberg said Mijailovic should be convicted of murder.

If found guilty of murder by the five-member panel - two professional judges and three laymen each with one vote - Mijailovic could be sentenced to between 10 years and life in prison. There is no jury in Swedish courts.

The court may also decide that Mijailovic, who had sought psychiatric help before the attack, should undergo a psychiatric examination. If found mentally ill, he would receive treatment and might not go to jail.

Born of Serbian immigrants to Sweden, Mijailovic went to live with his grandparents in Serbia as a child and returned to Sweden before fighting broke out in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.