Itkul Zumbayev

Itkul Zumbayev is the first victim in the investigation into a series of murdered boys, and the discovery of his remains at the Thorildsplan discovery site becomes the beginning of a case that reaches beyond one crime scene. He is later identified as the brother of Karakul Zumbayev, another missing boy. Together, their identities turn a sequence of anonymous bodies into evidence of a family’s loss and of children whose circumstances have left them especially difficult to protect.

Identity and Background

Itkul is a boy of Kazakh origin. The novel supplies little about his life before his disappearance: he is introduced through the investigation, first as one of the dead immigrant boys and later as one of two brothers reported missing from Syrets Metro Station. That absence of personal history is significant to how he enters the story. For much of the case, investigators encounter him through a body, forensic comparisons, and a dossier rather than through a living voice or a remembered account of his character.

The meaning of his name sharpens this portrait without filling in the life the narrative withholds. Ivo Andrić learns that Itkul means “dog’s slave,” while Karakul means “black slave.” The names lead him to consider the expectations that can be placed on a child from birth, and to imagine the bleak future their parents may have feared for their sons. This reflection does not establish what Itkul’s parents thought or knew; instead, it gives the names a wider resonance in a story where the boys are repeatedly treated as less visible and less valuable than other victims.

Discovery and the Emerging Case

The case begins to take shape when Jeanette Kihlberg is called to investigate another murdered boy, whose body has been found on Svartsjölandet by an elderly couple out exercising. The violence and the precision of the body’s treatment resemble an earlier crime. Jeanette concludes that the investigators may be dealing with the same perpetrator and therefore with a double murder. At this stage, the physical evidence is limited: investigators have casts of two shoe prints, one large and one much smaller, along with vehicle tyre tracks. The impressions may become useful only when they have something to compare them with.

The investigation expands as further boys are found. Four weeks after the first, a third boy is discovered at the boules club below Danvikstull. Experts describe the preservation of that body as successful embalming. The repeated handling of the bodies links the crimes in the detectives’ minds, but Itkul’s identity remains more than one item in a pattern: he is the first victim through whom the case’s recurrence becomes legible. The contrast between the methodical treatment of the dead and the fragmentary evidence left at the scenes defines the investigators’ problem. Similarities point toward a connection, but they do not by themselves identify who is responsible.

Identification of Itkul and Karakul

Months later, an international inquiry provides the breakthrough that joins the investigation to the boys’ missing-person records. Jeanette had sent a dossier about the dead immigrant boys to Interpol six months earlier. A DNA match finally brings a response from Iwan Lowynsky of the Ukrainian security police in Kyiv, who is seeking contact about a missing person. Lowynsky confirms that two boys, both child prostitutes and brothers, are missing from Syrets Metro Station: Itkul and Karakul.

The identification of Karakul as Itkul’s brother is then supported by forensic comparison. When Jeanette visits Ivo Andrić, he compares the new victim’s jaw with a photograph of Itkul. Both have a slightly crooked jaw, a feature that leads him to suspect they are brothers. Jeanette recognizes the implication: the body on the table is Karakul. The relationship is thus disclosed through the convergence of a physical resemblance, a missing-person report, and the earlier DNA work—not through a personal reunion or a family member’s testimony. The case moves from the question of whether separate murders are connected to the recognition that the dead boys were brothers.

Narrative Significance

Itkul’s role is largely that of a victim whose identity must be recovered from evidence. That structure is central to the case: the investigation has to make links across crime scenes, institutions, and national borders before it can restore the boys’ names and relationship. The six-month gap between Jeanette’s referral and the DNA match also shows how slowly recognition can arrive, even when information has already been sent beyond the immediate police investigation.

The novel places the boys’ names and origins beside the official language of forensics and police procedure. A crooked jaw, a DNA match, and the confirmation from Kyiv establish facts the investigation can act upon; the meanings of Itkul and Karakul’s names, by contrast, invite reflection on the lives and futures that the case cannot reconstruct. Itkul is not given an invented biography to compensate for that silence. His significance lies in what his identification changes: he is no longer only the first body in a sequence, but one of two brothers whose disappearance and deaths belong to the same human story.