Bureaucratic Torpor in Swedish Law Enforcement

I have reported several times on last month’s murder of Fuat Deniz; see the links at the bottom of this post for previous articles on this topic.

Dr. Deniz was an Assyrian Christian university professor the University of Örebro in Sweden, and there are strong indications that he was murdered as a result of his public declarations about the Assyrian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks early in the 20th century.

The Swedish authorities seem less than zealous in their attempts to find the culprit who slit Dr. Deniz’ throat. Paul Green of Greenspiece has been following the case. Exasperated with the performance of Swedish law enforcement, he wrote a letter to Jonas Hafstrom, Sweden’s ambassador to the United States, and has posted it on his blog. Below is an excerpt:

In all candor, Mr. Hafstrom, this does not speak well of either the competence or the motivation of Swedish law enforcement. At best, it bespeaks a police corps so suffused with bureaucratic torpor that its personnel couldn’t be bothered to interrupt their holiday revelries and relaxation with anything so trifling as the assassination of an internationally known genocide researcher. At worst, it suggests that the investigation into the murder of Professor Fuat Deniz has been neglected due to some squalid raison d’état.

I realize that as a diplomat, this police matter is outside your area of responsibility. All the same, I urge you to convey to the relevant organs of your government my outrage over Fuat Deniz’s assassination — and my concern that said organs have not been doing all they should to see justice done. Kindly advise them also that, as an independent journalist, I intend to do what I can to publicize this case in the United States.

The embassy’s response was not one to inspire confidence:

Dear Mr Green,

Thank you for your letter. We have forwarded it to the desk officer for Turkey at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Stockholm.

Sincerely,

Embassy of Sweden

The investigative journalist Nuri Kino has been relentless in his coverage of this story. His latest article was posted yesterday by the Eastern Star News Agency:
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Örebro police force makes new mistakes!

On the morning of Friday 28th December the confirmation came that the National Criminal Corps would be helping the Örebro police force in their hunt for university lecturer, Fuat Deniz’s, murderer.

It has been over three weeks since Dr. Deniz was stabbed on campus at the university of Örebro. It is, as I am aware, the first time that a lecturer has been killed at a university anywhere in Sweden. When I travelled to Örebro two days after the murder, I took for granted that the Örebro police force had contacted the National Criminal Police Corps, if for nothing else than to create a profile of the perpetrator. But they had not.

Today I spoke at length to one of the National Criminal Corps superiors. He wants to remain anonymous due to his desire to stay out of any political debate. In his opinion the Örebro police force didn’t contact the National Criminal Police Corps due to the fact that they believed they would catch the murderer without any help. The police chief was shocked at the mistakes that have been made during the murder investigation.

I have spoken to over fifty people close to Fuat Deniz, which is why I have also been very close to the case, and as a result the work of the police. In a debate article in Aftonbladet on 21st December I discussed several of the mistakes the police had made. Several. There are more. One example is one of Dr. Deniz’s best friends of the last twenty years, who was asked to wait before making a statement, due to the fact that he lives too far away. It took the police ten days to travel to Stockholm. Another friend travelled to Sweden from the United States after hearing about the murder. He volunteered to make a statement to the police and left the interview, shocked that they were more interested in Dr. Deniz’s girlfriends in the late eighties, than in any information he had to volunteer.

There are many leads the police should be following up, and maybe they are following up on them, but overall the police force’s priorities are mystifying.

The National Criminal Corps have a unit named ‘the perpetrator group’ Four policemen, a psychiatrist, and a medical examiner have, as their task, to work from known information regarding where, when and how a crime takes place, to attempt to describe possible personality traits of the perpetrator. The reasoning behind this is to narrow down the total number of possible suspects and hopefully lead the investigation towards a specific person. The investigators, in this case, the Örebro police force, contact the National Criminal Corps when they need help. The standard method is that the group sends one of their investigators, a technician, and sometimes also the group’s medical examiner.

The Örebro police force will, from today, Wednesday, and onwards receive help from one of the National Criminal Corps units, the murder commission. But in the words of the perpetrator group’s chief Paul Johansson, they haven’t been asked for help. This means that there is still no idea of potential murder suspects.

In an earlier interview with Ulf Åsgård, previously a member of ‘the perpetrator group’, he stated that without a profile of the perpetrator, no crime is solved.

“It is impossible to begin a search without first having an idea of what kind of criminal is being looked for,” stated Ulf Åsgård.

Earlier posts on this topic:

2007		Dec		15		The Long Arm of the Assyrian Genocide
				16		Silencing Any Discussion of the Assyrian Genocide
				18		Remembering Fuat Deniz
				19		A Political Murder? Unlikely, Says Swedish Expert
				22		Soft-Pedaling the Murder of Fuat Deniz
				25		The Swedish Keystone Cops
				30		Update on the Fuat Deniz Case