Kvaerner, which last year failed in its bid for the UK contractor Amec, is thought to be mainly interested in Trafalgar’s struggling John Brown and Davy engineering businesses. RUSSELL HOTTEN

Kvaerner, the Norwegian engineering group, is in takeover talks with Trafalgar House – in a move that may end Hongkong Land’s disastrous four- year investment in the UK company.
It was unclear last night whether Kvaerner wanted to buy all or part of Trafalgar, but the Norwegian company said that it was only interested in securing an agreed deal. As one ally said: “The problem was, he didn’t know how to leave.”. Having been deemed too controversial to be UN Secretary- General, he was to have spent the summer of 1986 exploring more realistic challenges. The election instead as party leader of Goran Persson, the heavyweight Finance Minister, will in effect be a formality.He has already had to appease the old-guard custodians of the welfare state and the trade-union movement, by proposing the raising of sickness benefits, which the reformists had fought to cut down.Palme’s inner circle recently disclosed that months before his death, he had grown increasingly distracted on the job; he had been struggling to find a way to step down from the premiership and pursue a full-time international career. The original heir-apparent, Mona Sahlin, withdrew in October after a scandal involving a mild but most un-Social Democratic offence: technical misuse of a government credit card.Ms Sahlin, seen as the reformer of Sweden’s creaking and overstretched welfare system, had been groomed to drag Swedish Social Democracy into the 20th century. Just over two weeks after tonight’s vigil, they will hold a party congress to elect a successor to Ingvar Carlsson, who inherited the party leadership from Mr Palme.

Early suspicions fell on a Kurdish group whose meeting place lay along the gunman’s escape route The lead eventually proved inconclusive. We didn’t always agree with him but he made you think.”On the night of 28 February, 1986, Olof Palme was shot at point-blank range by a lone gunman in a street in central Stockholm while walking home from the cinema with his wife. A botched operation by the Swedish police – unused as they were to political assassinations on the capital’s streets – failed to seal off the escape routes in time. The torchlit march through Stockholm tonight commemorating the 10th anniversary of Olof Palme’s assassination will be marked by a certain sense of pride.

It is a pride that has evolved slowly through the past decade in the very qualities that made the murdered prime minister difficult for many to stomach in life. In the run-up to the anniversary, many have recalled another march involving the Social Democratic firebrand nearly 30 years earlier: how in 1968 he walked side-by-side with the North Vietnamese ambassador through the streets of Stockholm, provoking dangerous tension in Sweden’s relationship with the United States and dismay among more moderate voices at home.
A drum-roll used to resound through the words of Olof Palme, the most uncharacteristically dramatic and controversial champion of the Swedish Social Democratic movement. More than anyone, he epitomised the image of Sweden as the world’s self-appointed conscience. No formal charges have been issued against General Djordje Djukic, who was arrested along with a Bosnian Serb colonel, Aleksa Krsmanovic.In seeking General Djukic’s release, a Belgrade lawyer, Milan Vujin, said his arrest and transfer to The Hague were illegal. The general is being held under a tribunal rule concerning the provisional arrest of suspects in urgent cases.. One rocket exploded over streets near a children’s hospital, an old people’s home and the Croatian dance academy.The tribunal agreed to consider an application for the release of a Bosnian Serb general arrested by Bosnia’s Muslim-led authorities last month and taken to The Hague by Nato forces on suspicion of war crimes.

The hearing in The Hague does not amount to a trial in absentia of Mr Martic, but prosecutors want tribunal judges to issue an international arrest warrant for him and confirm he should stand trial for war crimes.Mr Martic has spat defiance at the UN tribunal, telling Banja Luka television in Serb-held Bosnia last week: “I do not recognise the legitimacy of that tribunal and will not let them arrest me or put me on trial. Any such attempt will be considered an act of terrorism, and we are prepared to respond appropriately,” he said.Nato forces implementing the Dayton peace agreement for Bosnia were issued last week with “wanted” posters bearing Mr Martic’s photograph. They are empowered to arrest UN-indicted war criminals if they come across them in the course of their normal duties, but have no specific instructions to hunt down the accused men.Mr Martic was the first Serb leader to be made the subject of a special war crimes hearing. His Bosnian Serb counterparts, Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, have been formally accused of war crimes but remain at liberty in Serb-held parts of Bosnia.A British police investigator, Kevin Curtis, read out to the UN hearing a transcript of a television interview last May in which Mr Martic appeared to take personal responsibility for the rocket attacks on Zagreb.