It was undoubtedly sensational information that appeared on news and VG on Thursday evening. Via an agent, the secret services are said to have received a warning that a terrorist attack in Scandinavia could be imminent. The information came just six days before the shots were fired in the center of Oslo. But the police in the capital were never notified. Why the information never reached them is now one of the most central questions in the case. There are two actors who may have the answer, namely the Police’s security service and the Norwegian Armed Forces’ intelligence service. While PST is responsible for security within Norway, the E-tjenesten’s task is to conduct intelligence outside Norway. What kind of information did they include, and what did they share with each other? PST believes that the information they received from the E-service was “naked”, and that they did not know anything about the time, place, person or what was going to happen. The question is whether PST got to know everything that the E-service provided. Could it be that the security police only got parts of a picture, and that the E-service withheld information for the sake of an ongoing operation or to protect sources? And if it was so – would PST have acted in a different way if they had been given more concrete information on the table? Would the police and the public then have been notified and could the attack on 25 June then have been averted? If we are to interpret PST, they did not know enough to assess the severity of the warning, nor whether Oslo or other cities could be possible targets. This is supposed to be the reason why the capital’s police were not notified. The question is, however, whether this was a correct assessment. In Oslo, people were in the middle of the Pride celebrations, and a large-scale parade with several tens of thousands of participants was at the door. If the Oslo police had found out that something was going on, could the police management on their own initiative choose to step up security? Then it should be added that the threat assessment in Norway was already at a moderate level throughout the summer months of 2022, so it is probably not a given that the rosters in the Oslo police had been changed on the basis of the information provided by PST. In July 2014, PST warned that terrorism could happen in Norway within a few days. Then the preparedness was greatly intensified, Norwegian police were ordered to carry weapons at all times, and Oslo’s streets were almost flooded with police. Outside several popular beaches lay the Norwegian Armed Forces with warships, and police all over Norway were on their toes. The 2014 situation is in a way comparable to the incident in 2022, but back then the information was more specific, it came from several cooperating services and it concerned a number of named people. However, there is a picture of what happened when you pressed the big red button. As is known, no attack ever occurred at the time, and after a while the terrorist threat was downgraded. Another central question is what the PST did when they realized that the attack was a fact. It must have been a very short time after the shooting before the PST headquarters in Nydalen in Oslo was on high alert. Even high-level people are said to have come to work in the middle of the night to direct the work of the security services. With what we now know, it is also not surprising that PST chief Roger Berg already on the same day assessed the shooting as “an extreme Islamist terrorist act”. But did the colleagues in the Oslo police know the background to this? From there it was said that they “could not conclude, and that the investigation had to show whether there was actually politically motivated violence or hate crime”. It is an open question when the investigators in Oslo found out about the communication between the Islamist and the E-service agent, but it is a fact that two months passed before Arfan Bhatti was charged in the case. A third topic is what was communicated between PST and the Oslo police district about the threat level linked to the Pride events. Many remember the chaos that ensued when the police first allowed a commemoration in Rådhusplassen two days after the attack, only to advise against the event that same afternoon. It is a well-known fact that internally in the Oslo police there was a strong reaction to the communication with PST that day, and that many in the police suspected that they did not get to know everything. Maybe they were right. Then it should be added that much of the information in question here was classified. Not everyone in the “ordinary” police is security-cleared to such a high level, which may also have been a reason why not everyone was informed. All in all, there are still many and sometimes uncomfortable questions that remain unanswered. We may be able to get some of the answers through the ongoing investigation of the entire case complex. An independent committee is in the process of investigating all aspects of the authorities’ handling of the terrorist attack. Here, an important topic is what you found out when, and what you did with it. The director of police stated last summer that the evaluation is important for trust in the police. As it stands now, that is hardly an exaggeration.
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The secret services have a lot to answer for – Speech
