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Wanted dead or alive the hostage11/7/2023 ![]() ![]() The gunman consoled captive Birgitta Lundblad when she couldn’t reach her family by phone and told her, “Try again don’t give up.” Olsson draped a wool jacket over the shoulders of hostage Kristin Enmark when she began to shiver, soothed her when she had a bad dream and gave her a bullet from his gun as a keepsake. Holed up inside a cramped bank vault, the captives quickly forged a strange bond with their abductors. Press photographers and police snipers lie side by side on a roof opposite the bank where hostages were being held on August 24, 1973. ![]() The public flooded police headquarters with suggestions for ending the standoff that ranged from a concert of religious tunes by a Salvation Army band to sending in a swarm of angry bees to sting the perpetrators into submission. The unfolding drama captured headlines around the world and played out on television screens across Sweden. However, authorities refused the robber’s demand to leave with the hostages in tow to ensure safe passage. Within hours, the police delivered Olsson’s fellow convict, the ransom and even a blue Ford Mustang with a full tank of gas. Olsson, a safe-cracker who failed to return to prison after a furlough from his three-year sentence for grand larceny, demanded more than $700,000 in Swedish and foreign currency, a getaway car and the release of Clark Olofsson, who was serving time for armed robbery and acting as an accessory in the 1966 murder of a police officer. From underneath the folded jacket he carried in his arms, Jan-Erik Olsson pulled a loaded submachine gun, fired at the ceiling and, disguising his voice to sound like an American, cried out in English, “The party has just begun!”Īfter wounding a policeman who had responded to a silent alarm, the robber took four bank employees hostage. On the morning of August 23, 1973, an escaped convict crossed the streets of Sweden’s capital city and entered a bustling bank, the Sveriges Kreditbanken, on Stockholm’s upscale Norrmalmstorg square. ![]()
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