Gert Berglind

Gert Berglind, the former police commissioner, becomes a pivotal link between compromised investigations and a private network connected to Sigtuna. His role in questioning Per-Ola Silfverberg, his association with Karl Lundström, and his involvement with the Sihtunum i Diasporan foundation bring professional authority into uneasy proximity with the people and cases under scrutiny.

Office, networks, and reputation

Berglind conducted a follow-up interview with Per-Ola Silfverberg in Copenhagen. Prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist later recalled that Copenhagen police had asked him to attend in his official capacity; Berglind led the session, while Silfverberg’s lawyer, Viggo Dürer, was also present. The recollection places Berglind at the center of a consequential interview, but later evidence makes his connections to the participants more troubling than this formal arrangement first suggests.

Berglind and Karl Lundström had dealings through the Sihtunum i Diasporan foundation and met several times a year at meetings in Denmark. The foundation brought together people with connections to the Sigtuna boarding school, and the investigation identifies Berglind, Lundström, Dürer, Bengt Bergman, and Per-Ola Silfverberg as participants in its network. What initially appears to be a shared institutional or social affiliation thus becomes a route for connecting men whose links recur across the case.

The Ulrika Wendin investigation

Berglind’s professional judgment comes under sharper scrutiny through the investigation of Ulrika Wendin’s rape, which he had led. Seven years after the case, Jeanette Kihlberg confronts Kenneth von Kwist with the overlap: the same Berglind had also been involved in the investigation of Karl Lundström, which was dropped. Von Kwist says he had not perceived a connection. Jeanette then points out that when Annette Lundström provided Karl with an alibi for the night of the rape, the case was dropped without even checking whether her account was true.

Dennis Billing supplies a more personal account of the conflict. He says Berglind knew Karl Lundström through the foundation and saw him several times a year at meetings in Denmark. A photograph once displayed on the commissioner’s office bulletin board showed Berglind and Lundström holding a large fish each. It disappeared a few days before Lundström was questioned about the rape. When Billing had objected to Berglind questioning Ulrika, Berglind claimed he knew Lundström only in passing; Billing says the former commissioner was biased, knew it, and tried to conceal the relationship. The vanished photograph makes that denial look less like an innocent imprecision than an effort to erase a visible connection. In retrospect, Billing considers that rumors about Berglind may have had some truth to them.

A warning remembered too late

Years before the investigations converge, Berglind invites prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist to his summer cottage on Möja. Viggo Dürer is there with a Ukrainian associate who speaks no Swedish. During an argument, Berglind grows loud and upset while Dürer sits silent; then Dürer quietly says something in Russian to the other man. The Ukrainian goes to the hutch where Berglind keeps his prizewinning rabbits. Von Kwist and the others hear two brief squeaks, and the man returns with two freshly skinned breeding rabbits, each worth about ten thousand kronor. Berglind turns white and asks the visitors to leave.

At the time, von Kwist interprets Berglind’s reaction as distress over the lost prize money or affection for the animals. Remembering the scene later, he revises that explanation: Berglind had been terrified, and understood what kind of person Dürer was. The memory transforms a seemingly private outburst into a warning that the prosecutor failed to recognize when it happened; now he fears he may have understood it too late.

Berglind’s name also surfaces in Annette Lundström’s disordered account of who might gather at Polcirkeln. She places him among the expected company, alongside Karl Lundström, Dürer, Per-Ola Silfverberg, Charlotte and Madeleine Silfverberg, and Linnea Lundström. When Jens Hurtig reminds her that Berglind and the others are dead, the contradiction underscores how the names remain present in her psychosis. Annette nevertheless describes Berglind as exceptionally clever and one of Sweden’s best policemen, a lingering image of public authority that sits uneasily beside the evidence of his private associations.

Institutional exposure and aftermath

By the time the investigation’s evidence is assembled, Berglind’s connection to the case has become a public-institutional liability as well as a private scandal. Dennis Billing visits Jeanette Kihlberg because he anticipates the consequences of making the evidence public. Jeanette tells him that Berglind cannot simply be removed from the case; the files, she recognizes, already implicate Billing’s predecessor in financing child pornography. The prospect of press scrutiny therefore rests not on rumor alone but on material gathered by the investigation, and it threatens to turn the police institution’s handling of the case into part of the story.

That reckoning sharpens the contrast at the center of Berglind’s characterization. He remains in Annette Lundström’s confused recollections an exceptionally clever policeman, and the office he once held lends his name institutional weight. Yet the accumulated evidence associates that authority with a dropped rape investigation, an undisclosed relationship with Karl Lundström, and financial support for child pornography. Berglind’s importance lies in how those details converge: the apparent separation between respectable public service and the private network under investigation proves impossible to maintain.