passport application form for one Idris Ghidi, born 1950. A man with a moustache, olive skin and black hair going grey at the temples.
He was Kurdish, a refugee from Iraq. Olsson had dug up much more on Ghidi than on any other hospital worker. Ghidi had apparently aroused media attention for a time, and appeared in several articles.
Born in the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, he graduated as an engineer and had been part of the "great economic leap forward" in the '70s. In 1984 he was a teacher at the College of Construction Technology in Mosul. He had not been known as a political activist, but he was a Kurd, and so a potential criminal in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In 1987 Ghidi's father was arrested on suspicion of being a Kurdish militant. No elaboration was forthcoming. He was executed in January 1988. Two months later Idris Ghidi was seized by the Iraqi secret police, taken to a prison outside Mosul, and tortured there for eleven months to make him confess. What he was expected to confess, Ghidi never discovered, so the torture continued.
In March 1989, one of Ghidi's uncles paid the equivalent of 50,000 Swedish kronor, to the local leader of the Ba'ath Party, as compensation for the injury Ghidi had caused the Iraqi state. Two days later he was released into his uncle's custody. He weighed thirty-nine kilos and was unable to walk. Before his release, his left hip was smashed with a sledgehammer to discourage any mischief in the future.
He hovered between life and death for several weeks. When, slowly, he began to recover, his uncle took him to a farm well away from Mosul and there, over the summer, he regained his strength and was eventually able to walk again with crutches. He would never regain full health. The question was: what was he going to do in the future? In August he learned that his two brothers had been arrested. He would never see them again. When his uncle heard that Saddam Hussein's police were looking once more for Ghidi, he arranged, for a fee of 30,000 kronor, to get him across the border into Turkey and thence with a false passport to Europe.
Idris Ghidi landed at Arlanda airport in Sweden on 19 October, 1989. He did not know a word of Swedish, but he had been told to go to the passport police and immediately to ask for political asylum, which he did in broken English. He was sent to a refugee camp in Upplands Vasby. There he would spend almost two years, until the immigration authorities decided that Ghidi did not have sufficient grounds for a residency permit.
By this time Ghidi had learned Swedish and obtained treatment for his shattered hip. He had two operations and could now walk without crutches. During that period the Sjobo debate[5] had been conducted in Sweden, refugee camps had been attacked, and Bert Karlsson had formed the New Democracy Party.
The reason why Ghidi had appeared so frequently in the press archives was that at the eleventh hour he came by a new lawyer who went directly to the press, and they published reports on his case. Other Kurds in Sweden got involved, including members of the prominent Baksi family. Protest meetings were held and petitions were sent to Minister of Immigration Birgit Friggebo, with the result that Ghidi was granted both a residency permit and a work visa in the kingdom of Sweden. In January 1992 he left Upplands Vasby a free man.
Ghidi soon discovered that being a well-educated and experienced construction engineer counted for nothing. He worked as a newspaper boy, a dish-washer, a doorman, and a taxi driver. He liked being a taxi driver except for two things. He had no local knowledge of the streets in Stockholm county, and he could not sit still for more than an hour before the pain in his hip became unbearable.
In May 1998 he moved to Goteborg after a distant relative took pity on him and offered him a steady job at an office-cleaning firm. He was given a part-time job managing a cleaning crew at Sahlgrenska hospital, with which the company had a contract. The work was routine. He swabbed floors six days a week including, as Olsson's ferreting had revealed, in corridor 11C.
Blomkvist studied the photograph of Idris Ghidi from the passport application. Then he logged on to the media archive and picked out several of the articles on which Olsson's report was based. He