The Danish tabloid Se og Hør posted an article on its website last Friday speculating that Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf was a suspect in the investigation of the murder of reputed Stockholm underworld kingpin Mille Markovic.
The completely unsubstantiated accusation against the king came after Markovic was gunned down in his car last week outside central Stockholm.
“The police are looking for a perpetrator, but suspicions about who is behind the execution automatically must include the king,” read the article. “This may be a contract killing and the king is among those with an obvious motive to want Markovic out of the way.”
Sex club king
Markovic had once claimed that he had compromising photos of King Carl XVI Gustaf visiting a sex club.
Experts later concluded that the images Markovic released of the king at Privé, a sex club once owned by Markovic, had been faked.
Se og Hør removed the article shortly after it was posted.
“The article was illegal and was therefore – sensibly enough – removed,” Axel Calssendors, a lawyer for the Swedish Royal Family told the magazine Journalisten. “We have no further comments at this time.”
"A spectacular story"
Se og Hør’s editor-in-chief, Niels Pinborg “regretted” the error but said that Markovic’s death remains a “spectacular” story and that he is considering publishing a different version.
“The Swedish media is covering the story in a similar fashion to the way we reported it,” Pinborg told Journalisten. “They are speculating on the fact that a man with close connections to the king was murdered. Suspicion and speculation are not restricted to the police.”
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Pinborg said that the way the original article read was “too specific” and that crime reporting was not his paper’s area of expertise.
"We are a tabloid, not a crime magazine, and I was simply not sharp enough as an editor,” he said.
