"But, Sven, it will only be in the leg."
These were the words of Kristin Enmark (23), one of four people held hostage at gunpoint in a Swedish bank.
It was the second day of the siege, and robber Jan-Erik Olson wanted to show the police that he wasn't joking by shooting her terrified banker colleague Sven Safstrom.
Enmark told the BBC's Witness History in 2016: “Jan said to him: 'I will not hurt a bone in your body; I'll just shoot the part where no major injury will occur."
Looking back on it today, she couldn't understand her own inhuman reaction.
"In that situation, I thought that somehow he was a coward, because he wouldn't let them shoot him in the leg.
"I think it's awful that I thought that and said that, but I think it also shows what can happen when people find themselves in a situation that's so absurd.
"It is a situation that leads to such a moral change. I'm really ashamed of that," she said.
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Although Oslon did not carry out the plan, Safstrom later admitted that he too felt gratitude towards his own jailers, and that he had to force himself to remember that these were violent criminals and not his friends.
The term "Stockholm syndrome" was coined by the Swedish criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot after the siege to explain the seemingly irrational attachment of some hostages to their captors.
The theory reached the general public a year later when the California heiress of the media empire Patty Hearst was kidnapped by revolutionary militants.
The 19-year-old appeared to have developed deep sympathy for the kidnappers and joined them in the robbery.
She was eventually caught and given a prison sentence.
According to her lawyer, she was brainwashed and suffered from Stockholm syndrome.
The art of police negotiation in hostage crises was first demonstrated in the 1970s by the examples of New York police officers Frank Boltz and Harvey Schlossberg.
The idea stemmed from a failed rescue attempt at the 1972 Munich Olympics, when 11 Israeli hostages were killed after being captured by members of a Palestinian militant group.
In 1980, Boltz and Schlossberg appeared in the BBC documentary Inside Story: Cops for Hostages and explained that the New York Police Department's team to negotiate with the kidnappers had been set up for fear of something similar happening again in their city.
Their goal was to safely de-escalate situations rather than go in Hollywood-style with all guns blazing.
Delaying tactics allowed the captors to make more mistakes and created space to build relationships with their captors, reducing the likelihood of a violent end.
In the late 1.500s, some 200 police departments sent representatives to New York to learn from Boltz's hands-on experience gained in more than XNUMX hostage incidents.
These lessons traveled even further when the BBC documentary crew listened to a lecture given by Boltz and Schlossberg, a former traffic officer with a doctorate in psychology.
For Schlossberg, Stockholm Syndrome - or Survival Identification Syndrome - was not a complicated concept.
"We just mean that when two or more people stay together, they build a relationship - and that's it," he said.
"Of course, the more stress there is in the situation, the faster the relationship, and the more intense it will be. When people are in crisis, and they're not sure what's going to happen, one thing we all fear is going crazy.
"I mean, we always worry, are we losing our minds? Is this really happening to me? What am I even looking for in all this? Am I really experiencing this?
"And we actually want to test our feelings against another person, because if that person shares our experience and sees the same thing, and they're not crazy and it's really happening, then maybe everything will be okay."
Schlossberg said that while criminals often give hostages a phone to talk to negotiators, there was no point in trying to get secret information from them.
"The hostage will tell the criminal anything you tell him. They are terrible witnesses and when they are released, the intelligence they give you should be taken with a grain of salt."
Bolc said that when kidnappers make demands, it's important not to turn them down right away.
He says, “Never reject them, but don't necessarily give in to them either. You always have to tell them, 'Let me see what I can do - let me try to do something for you'."
Schlossberg says it is crucial that police keep control of the situation, insisting that the kidnapper "talks to our negotiator or he won't talk to anyone."
"We don't want lawyers, mothers, priests - we don't want them talking," he says.
“The fantasy is that if you don't get the person you want to talk to, you won't talk to anyone else. The reality is - how long can you sit in that room and have no contact with anyone from the outside world?"
Under siege
At the time of the Stockholm siege, none of those lessons were available to the Stockholm police, who made a series of rookie mistakes that would never happen today.
When Olson stormed into Sveriges Kreditbanken, he demanded three million Swedish kroner, a getaway vehicle and another criminal brought to him from prison.
Although he did not get the money and the vehicle, psychiatrist Nils Bejerot advised the police to comply with his request that Clark Olofsson, one of Sweden's most notorious criminals, be brought to the bank in Stockholm's Normmalmstorg square.
Olofsson was assigned to work for the police as an insider in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Bejerot was the man who coined the term Normalmstorg syndrome, later better known as Stockholm syndrome.
For some, this theorizing was an attempt to deflect attention from the mistakes he and his police colleagues made during the siege, instead blaming the victims.
During the siege, four hostages and two criminals began to develop an unexpected closeness in the bank vault, thanks to the kindness of the captors.
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By comparison, the prisoners expressed more hostility towards the police, fearing that any attempt to end the stalemate could end in their deaths.
The charismatic Olofsson convinced prisoner Kristin Enmark to have a telephone conversation with Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.
She begged to be allowed to leave the bank in the getaway vehicle with the kidnappers, telling him:
"I think you are sitting there playing with our lives. I completely trust Clark and the robber. I'm not desperate. They didn't harm us.
"On the contrary, they were very kind to us. But, you know, Ulof, I am most afraid that they will attack the police and lead to our deaths."
Reflecting on this in 2016, Enmark told the BBC:
"I wish that phone conversation hadn't happened because it was a completely insignificant conversation. I sat there and begged for my life. He was the prime minister. What could he tell me?"
The hostages were held in a bank vault for several days while surrounded by armed police.
The police eventually decided to break through the ceiling and use tear gas to disarm the kidnappers.
The police shouted for the hostages to come out first, but they refused, believing that the kidnappers would be killed.
Instead, as the criminals were leaving, they stopped in the doorway to hug the two female hostages.
Hostage Safstrom, who had narrowly escaped being shot in the leg shortly before, received a manly handshake.
It was behavior that puzzled many Swedes who had been preoccupied with the dramatic events at the bank for days.
Although Bejerot diagnosed Stockholm Syndrome without even speaking to Enmark, the theory seemed like a plausible explanation, and excited the imagination of the international media.
For New York negotiators in hostage crises by Frank Boltz and Harvey Schlossberg in the 1980 documentary, the concept can be understood as a useful teaching tool to describe interpersonal dynamics in traumatic situations.
However, this label is a complete misrepresentation of Krista's experience, according to Dr. Alan Wade, a Canadian therapist who has spoken extensively with her.
"The term Stockholm syndrome has deep roots in psychoanalytic thought in Europe. But in that moment, he was used to silence and discredit an angry woman who resisted violence, protected herself and other people for six and a half days.
"It was used to justify the police response," he told the BBC in 2023:
Kristin said in 2016 that she remained friends with Olofsson, the man bailed out of prison to meet the demands of the Olson robber.
Dr. Wade said that during the siege, "the captive actually kind of worked to make people feel safer, and if you treat Clark Olofsson as just another kidnapper, you're going to have a very hard time understanding why Christine and the others had any what a positive attitude towards him."
Speaking to the BBC's Sideways podcast in 2021, Kristen delivered a very harsh critique of Stockholm Syndrome:
"It's pure nonsense, if I may say so on the BBC. It's a way to blame the victim. I did everything I could to survive."
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