A week ago, both the Attorney General and the Minister of Justice announced that they will launch a major investigation into the entire Baneheia complex. The aim is to find out what went wrong when Viggo Kristiansen was sentenced to the law’s strictest punishment and served for over 20 years before anyone took action. It is expected that the announced investigation will cover both the investigation itself, the court proceedings and all the rounds of refusals from the readmission commission. It is likely that the last commission round will also come into focus, even though the case was decided to be reopened with the narrowest possible majority. As we know, the Agder police were strongly against reopening the case. And the police leadership was supported by the state prosecutors in Agder. “The fact that Kristiansen repeatedly requests the reopening of the case is in no way a factor that weakens the evidence against him,” said the first state prosecutor Erik Erland Holmen and state prosecutor Jan Tallaksen. The reply from the state prosecutors was largely based on the police’s recommendation. There, the conclusion was clear: “We do not find that any of what Sjødin lists in the petition and in the many additional letters constitute new evidence or circumstances that are relevant as grounds for reinstatement.” The police’s recommendation was signed by prosecutor Terje Kaddeberg Skaar alone. But now it turns out that he got help in writing the text. It comes to light in the wake of the Bureau’s investigation into the Agder police. The topic here was whether the police did something criminal when they failed to disclose the abuse allegations against Jan Helge Andersen. As expected, the unit did not find that anyone could be blamed for deliberately withholding the information. Former crime chief Arne Pedersen had status as a suspect in the case, but the conclusion was that he had done nothing criminal. The Bureau’s investigation has examined what happened at the police station in Kristiansand before the submission to the state prosecutors was delivered in 2019. One of the findings is that it was Arne Pedersen who was brought in to help the police management respond to the demand for reinstatement. Pedersen had retired three years earlier. He led the investigation into the Baneheia murders. And he stated as recently as April this year that he still believed that Viggo Kristiansen was guilty. “I am no less sure today than I was 22 years ago,” he said in an interview with news. In the Bureau’s decision, it appears that Pedersen was very central when the police’s new response was to be written. In an interview, the ex-criminal chief himself confirms that he was responsible for most of it. “It was Pedersen who wrote most of what they went through. Pedersen made a draft which they discussed and made adjustments to. Everything they wrote they stood together about”, one can read from the interrogation. According to the Bureau, it was all approved by the first state attorney. It is tempting to ask how much influence Pedersen actually had on the police’s attitude in the last round of commissions. It is understandable that he was contacted because he was the one who knew the most about the matter. And the petition from lawyer Sjødin undoubtedly contained a number of details and issues that were demanding to assess. But how objective did it really become? Wouldn’t it be an advantage if the police in Kristiansand let new investigators read up on the case and look at it with new eyes? Why wasn’t more investigation already done then? Instead, the police continued to argue for Viggo Kristiansen’s guilt. In the statement, for example, it was said about the much-discussed telephone evidence that “In our opinion, it is once again a derailment in relation to the overall picture of evidence when Sjødin continues to pay so much attention to circumstances that the courts have unequivocally assessed as irrelevant in relation to the central the evidence in the case” It is of course easy to have hindsight. But it is a fact that the whole case changed character when it was taken over by the state prosecutors in Oslo and sent to the Oslo police for a new investigation. As is well known, the new investigation was decisive for the Attorney General’s demand for an acquittal. The police and prosecution’s handling of the reinstatement requests is quite certainly one of the things that will be put under the microscope when the entire case complex is now to be investigated. Many of those who worked on the case at the time, including Arne Pedersen, have long since retired. But not all. There are still people both in the police management and with the state prosecutors who have been responsible for parts of the handling of the Baneheia case. It will be interesting to see if the aftermath has consequences for any of them.
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