Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden married Daniel Westling (now Prince Daniel) on a warm summer day in 2010. Huge celebrations were planned around the 19 June nuptials, and Swedes had been looking forward to the big event for a long time
By the wedding day, hundreds of thousands of people flocked onto the streets of Stockholm; almost half a million people were on the streets of the Swedish capital to take part.
However, there was quite a concerning moment during the celebrations that had not been revealed until now.
Swedish Police Chief Michael Fetz, with help from writer Niclas Andersson, has published a new book that reveals the drama that unfolded behind the scenes that day. Police Chief Fetz, responsible for the security at many important events in Sweden, was tasked with security around the royal wedding. Planning began one year before when the engagement between the couple was announced.
Fetz wrote in his book: “We planned how we were going to do this, for a whole year, so that it would be a nice day for Victoria and Daniel, but also to be sure that it was safe for everyone who was going to participate, both royals, guests and spectators.”
On the day Sweden’s Crown Princess married, there were more than two thousand policemen at work.
Preparations for the royal wedding consisted of many forms of training – including a visit to Oslo, where police and other security personnel received useful information regarding how to handle security, after the Norwegian police had handled US President Obama’s visit in 2009. The team also travelled to the Netherlands, where the year before there had been an assassination attempt on the Dutch royals.
From a back room, the police chief watched the motorcade closely during the wedding celebrations, and that is when the drama unfolded.
The police chief said: “Then suddenly I saw on one screen that there was a black-and-white picture of a small plane. I just thought, ‘What is this? It doesn’t match my image of what it should look like.’ So I actually thought at first that some of the policemen had put on an old aeroplane film from the 50s since everything was going so well. That was my first thought. However, I soon realised that this was for real. One plane was headed straight for the cortege, despite the fact that the entire airspace was forbidden to travel in.”
Extensive work began to reach the pilot, but it turned out that the plane was flying towards the Royal Palace with the radio switched off. The Swedish Air Force was put on alert. Several fighter jets were already in the air and heading towards the plane. On the ground, Police Chief Michael Fetz was in command of a number of surface-to-air missiles.
When the plane approached the city centre, he had no choice; he gave the order to shoot the aircraft down.
Only seconds before a missile was to be fired, two fighters approached on either side of the small plane and forced it off its course. The pilot detected the radio was off, turned it on and was notified to reverse course immediately.
The police chief wrote in his book: “It turned out that he was a completely ordinary person, who had missed the fact that there was a wedding and forbidden airspace. But it was close to ending in tragedy, and it would have been a tragedy no matter what we had done.”
The man who flew the plane was forced to land at a military air station, where he was questioned but released the same day. It was concluded that he did not intend to target the Swedish Royal Family.
