Christian Habersaat's Beretta 92 pistol

Christian Habersaat's Beretta 92 pistol is both the instrument of his suicide at his retirement reception and an unresolved object in the investigation that follows. The weapon's identity is clear enough to distinguish it from Habersaat's police service weapon; its ownership history is not. A possible link to a pistol that disappeared from a deceased teacher's estate draws attention toward the Bornholm Folk High School, but the available accounts never confirm that the two weapons are the same.

Appearance and Use at the Reception

At the reception marking his retirement, Habersaat expected a larger gathering than the one that arrived. After greeting the attendees and pouring wine, he invited them to take a glass. As they assembled in front of him, he discreetly reached into his pocket and took the safety off his pistol. The motion comes before any visible threat: the attendees are gathered for a farewell, while Habersaat has already made the weapon ready.

He then drew the pistol so violently that the people nearest him disappeared from his field of vision. For a brief moment he saw fear and horror spread among his superiors as he pointed it at them; then he shot himself. The gun's role in the scene is therefore not merely that of a concealed object suddenly revealed. Its movement—from pocket, to aimed weapon, to the means of Habersaat's death—turns a formal retirement gathering into an act that his colleagues cannot prevent.

The pistol also contrasts with the ceremonial order of the occasion. Habersaat had abandoned his long planned speech and was addressing a sparse audience that included senior police officials. His decision to carry the gun into this public setting, keep it hidden while offering drinks, and then draw it in front of those officials makes the weapon the material point at which his farewell becomes irreversible.

Identification and Distinction from His Service Weapon

Afterward, John Birkedal tells Carl Mørck and Assad that Habersaat shot himself in the head with a 9mm Beretta 92. It was not Habersaat's service weapon: he had left that firearm in the weapons depot shortly before handing in his identification badge and keys at the station. The distinction matters. The pistol was not simply the weapon assigned to him in his police work; Birkedal says Habersaat did not have permission to possess it.

Birkedal describes the Beretta as relatively big and solid, substantial enough that he initially thought it was a fake when Habersaat pulled it out and aimed it at the police commissioner and at Birkedal himself. The description anchors the weapon in the witnesses' recollection of the reception: it was not an indistinct object noticed only after the suicide, but a conspicuous handgun whose appearance made the threat immediately legible.

The exact model subtype remains unconfirmed. Assad asks whether the pistol was a basic model or one of several variants, including the 92S, 92SB, 92F, FG, or FS. He rules out the 92A1 on chronological grounds, since that series dates from 2010. Carl stops him, judging the distinction irrelevant to their reason for travelling to Bornholm. The exchange establishes both the specificity of the weapon inquiry and its limits: its broad identification as a Beretta 92 is reported, but no subtype is verified.

Possible Provenance and Uncertainty

Birkedal says the police do not know where Habersaat obtained the pistol. A similar Beretta had disappeared from the estate of a deceased person near Aakirkeby five or six years earlier, but the former owner had no papers, leaving the police without a way to check whether it was the same gun. Similarity and timing supply a lead, not a chain of ownership. The account does not turn the missing weapon into a proven source for Habersaat's pistol.

The former owner was Jakob Swiatek, a teacher at the folk high school who died during the semester in 2009. His death was attributed by the autopsy to natural causes resulting from a weak heart. Former students and teachers recalled that Swiatek had been greatly interested in small arms and had shown some students a pistol; from their descriptions, it could have matched the Beretta Habersaat used. This testimony makes the possible connection more concrete, while remaining second-hand recollection rather than confirmation through records or an identifiable weapon.

Birkedal adds that Habersaat had taken a particular interest in Swiatek's death when the property was checked. That detail ties the dead officer to the estate inquiry, but does not explain what he found or prove why he was interested. The pistol's history thus remains a set of adjacent facts: an unauthorized Beretta in Habersaat's possession, a similar gun missing from Swiatek's estate, and Habersaat's attention to the teacher's death.

Investigative Significance

The gun briefly redirects the investigation from the manner of Habersaat's suicide toward its possible source. Assad's questions pursue technical distinctions; Birkedal supplies the uncertain estate connection; and Carl resists allowing the weapon's subtype to take priority. Carl explains that the journey was not principally intended to establish why Habersaat killed himself, but to address Rose's belief that the Alberte case should have been taken on for him. The pistol is therefore a genuine clue and, at the same time, a possible distraction from the case Department Q has come to examine.

Its possible provenance also brings the police inquiry back to the folk high school and to a death that was classified as natural. Nothing in the account proves that Swiatek's missing pistol and Habersaat's Beretta were identical, or that the teacher's death was anything other than the autopsy's finding. The object creates a question across those circumstances without resolving it. That tension gives the weapon significance beyond its immediate function at the reception: it offers a material trail, but not an answer, in a narrative already shaped by old testimony, incomplete records, and Habersaat's fixation on Alberte's death.