Israel has refused to offer an apology demanded by Sweden for the 1948 assassination of U.N. mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat, by members of the underground Stern Gang.
Israel apologized for the killing immediately after it occurred 40 years ago.
But Sweden insists a second apology is due because a former member of the Stern Gang, Yehoshua Zeitler, admitted to the crime in an interview published in Yediot Achronot last weekend.
The Israeli ambassador, Moshe Erell, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Stockholm Wednesday to receive the demand.
Israel promptly rejected it on grounds that no new evidence has come to light since 1948 to warrant another apology.
The Yediot Achronot article reported what has been generally known over the years, that the Stern Gang — known by the acronym Lehi — ordered the murder of Bernadotte.
The motivation was his alleged plans to internationalize Jerusalem and award the Arabs large areas of Palestine that Israeli forces had captured in the 1948 War of Independence.
Zeitler said four people carried out the assassination, but that Premier Yitzhak Shamir, then one of the leaders of the Stern Gang, was not directly implicated in the act.
A former Lehi theoretician, Yisrael Eldar (Sheib) claims, however, that Shamir was in fact one of four men responsible for planning assassinations.
But Eldar could not confirm that Shamir attended the specific meeting at which Bernadotte’s murder was ordered.
Shamir was one of the triumvirate that headed the Stern Gang after British soldiers killed its founder, Avraham Stern, in 1942.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
