"I don't want secret service protection, I can't accept the kind of lifestyle that would imply," Lindh told an interviewer a few months before her brutal murder.

Lindh died on Thursday, a day after being stabbed by a lone attacker in full view of a department store crowd -- and not a bodyguard in sight.

Shopping, walking, travelling: Lindh wanted to deal with the pleasures and chores of daily life like any other Swede without a security apparatus to get in the way. And she was no exception among her country's top politicians.

The minister lived with her family in Nykoeping, a cosy town south of Stockholm where her husband is a local politician.

She would usually take the train for her 100-kilometre commute to the corridors of power in Stockholm.

And unless her minister's schedule forbade it, she would return home every evening where her two boys, aged nine and twelve, would wait for their mum to help with the homework.

Her fear that close security would introduce an element of menace into her children's lives played a big role in her decision to keep bodyguards away.

"You are the greatest parents in the world, but we wish you had a different job," David and Philip once told their mother.

"There is no way you force a minister to accept police protection," said Margareta Linderoth, head of secret police Saepo's terrorism unit.

"That would go against the liberty and the rights of government ministers," she said.

Immediately after the attack, Saepo admitted its policy had been "a failure".

Lindh was not foolhardy and she became more conscious of safety over the years.

"I no longer take the metro in the evenings. I don't mind using public transport, but I stay away from places where there are drunks," Lindh once said.

"I miss taking my children around. It's true that usually people are friendly and pleasant, but of course you never know," she said.

Lindh become foreign minister in 1998, an appointment that catapulted her onto the world arena and made her one of Sweden's most-exposed politicians.

But as a committed pacifist, Lindh would not dream of allowing herself to be cut off from the street.

Her mentor, former prime minister Olof Palme, also wouldn't hear of bodyguards and he was also murdered by a lone attacker in central Stockholm in 1986, 17 years before Lindh suffered an eerily similar fate.

Lindh was a great defender of Swedish neutrality under which her country only sends peace-keeping forces to the world's hot spots.

But Sweden has joined the international "fight against terrorism" and the government regularly comments on the Middle East situation, critical of both Palestinian attacks and Israeli repression.

Sweden backed the United Nations approach to the Iraq conflict and Anna Lindh herself joined protests against United States' policy.

Police have said that there was no evidence of any real threat to Lindh's safety but she had her share of insults and hate mail.

Two weeks before the attack, her office received a menacing e-mail, which she herself never saw, and nobody on her staff took seriously enough to pass on to police.

While Saepo reviews its routine procedures, all Swedish ministers have been placed under increased protection, whether they like it or not.

WAR.WIRE