More than six months after Sweden's popular foreign minister Anna Lindh was knifed to death while shopping for clothes in a chic department store, Swedes will finally see her killer sentenced on Tuesday. Brushing aside last-ditch attempts to get her self-confessed attacker, 25-year old Mijailo Mijailovic, off the hook, a Stockholm court last week cleared the way for the harshest possible penalty for murder allowed under Swedish law, life behind bars. Lindh died on September 11 of repeated stab wounds to her stomach, chest and arms a day earlier. Her death caused shock among Swedes who expected her to one day lead the country as prime minister and brought back painful memories of the unsolved 1986 killing of prime minister Olof Palme. Mijailovic confessed to the crime early on, claiming he had heard voices in his head which made him seek out and brutally stab Lindh. It quickly emerged that Mijailovic is a tortured young man with violent tendencies, torn since childhood between his parents' roots in Serbia and his new home in Sweden. While firmly establishing Mijailovic's guilt in January, the court also allowed for the possibility that he might be mentally unstable and ordered psychiatric testing, which might have led to the lesser charge of manslaughter. But the six-week probe concluded that Mijailovic was not mentally ill, neither when he stabbed the foreign minister nor afterwards. His lawyer's last-minute request to allow a panel of experts to review the test results and re-test Mijailovic, while approved by the prosecution, was surprisingly rejected by the court. Chief judge Goeran Nilsson said there were "no good reasons" for ordering such a review, and announced the date for sentencing. Prosecutor Agneta Blidberg promptly reiterated her demand that Mijailovic be locked up for life, which in Sweden usually means about 15 years but can be longer. "He should be sentenced to life imprisonment for murder," she said, repeating her claim that Mijailovic "knows what he did" and "his intentions were clear." During the trial, Blidberg had repeatedly argued that Mijailovic acted rationally both before, during and after the crime, and said his actions were not those of a confused or mentally unstable man. "That is also what the psychiatric examination showed, that he is very aware of time and space," she said last week. "The reason for the brutality and rawness that he displayed can be explained by the fact that Mijailovic considers himself to have been subjected to injustice and abuse of power, while his view of women is akin to hatred," Blidberg said. Josef Zila, a Stockholm University lecturer in criminal law, said that based on previous similar cases he expected the court to hand down a life sentence. He said that the fact that Lindh was foreign minister was likely to play a role in the court's sentencing. "One life should not be worth more than another, but she was the flagbearer of certain values," he said. Mijailovic's lawyer, Peter Althin, meanwhile called the court's decision to reject a review "deeply regrettable", saying the psychiatric examination had "many weak points". "Now we will have a debate that will always be there, lingering on," he said. While Althin's repeated earlier calls for his client to be freed never had a serious chance of success, legal experts said he may have managed to sow enough doubt about the psychiatric examination to make a successful appeal to Tuesday's sentence. Althin expressed concern that Mijailovic would not receive the psychiatric care he needed if he were to be sentenced to prison. Althin has argued that Mijailovic's attack on Lindh was the result of sleep-deprivation and a potent cocktail of wrongly-prescribed medication for mental problems, saying his client was no assassin. The killing was "a random act", Althin told the court on Tuesday. "He was guided by voices and attacked. There was no planning. The intent was to harm but not to kill," he said. "Now, Mijailo Mijailovic will have to live without knowing what his psychiatric state was on September 10," he said. Swedes still badly miss Anna Lindh, their foreign minister who proved that there is room for humanity even in the rough arena of top politics. As foreign minister, Lindh represented her country abroad with political ideals that were also her own personal goals -- defending democracy, human rights and equality -- values Swedes cherish and in which they take immense pride. **PHOTO CAPTION*** Mijailo Mijailovic in the courtroom, March 23, 2004. (AFP/Pressensbild/Henrik Montgomery)