Threat emailed to Lindh two weeks ago

SWEDISH Foreign Minister Anna Lindh was sent an email threatening her and her children two weeks before she was fatally stabbed while out shopping, the Foreign Ministry said yesterday.

The email accused Lindh who campaigned hard for Swedes to vote Yes to joining the euro in a referendum of being a "power- hungry bitch sitting in the lap of big business", public service SR radio quoted from the letter.

The email, which was not passed on to police, was sent to Lindh on August 27, the day after an article written by her and Carl-Henric Svanberg, chief executive of flagship telecoms company Ericsson, was published in a leading daily newspaper.

Lindh, a member of the working- class-rooted centre-left Social Democratic Party, and Svanberg, one of Sweden's richest men, argued that a rejection of the EU's common currency would hit jobs and investment in the Swedish economy.

Lindh, a 46-year-old mother-of- two, was fatally stabbed by an unknown male attacker on Wednesday when she was out shopping with a friend. She died of her wounds on Thursday.

Like most Swedish politicians, apart from the prime minister, she had no bodyguards.

Many Swedes fear her murder will go unsolved like that of then Prime Minister Olof Palme who was shot dead in central Stockholm in 1986 while walking home from a cinema. Palme had given his bodyguards a night off.

Top Foreign Ministry official Mikael Eriksson told the radio the letter was not passed on to the police unit

responsible for ministers' security, Sapo. He did not specify what threats were contained in the email.

Eriksson said Lindh had not seen the email because she had explicitly said she did not want to see any such letters.

Meanwhile, Swedish police said they have no main suspect for the murder, but are checking on a number of known criminals they want to question in connection with her brutal stabbing.

Swedish media reported police were looking for a 32-year-old man with a criminal record. However, officials said that was "definitely not true".

Police overnight searched shelters and lodgings in Stockholm looking for suspects.

"There is new information coming in all the time," said police official Mats Nylen.

There was no results of the technical analysis of the clothes or the murder weapon, a knife, which the killer is believed to have thrown away when fleeing the scene, he said.