Kriminalamt (Kripos)

Kriminalamt (Kripos) is the investigative agency that takes control of the murder investigation and, under Mikael Bellman, announces the arrest of a man suspected of five killings. Its authority is tested by Harry Hole, who argues that his own team found crucial links and a fourth victim while the agency had been unable to demonstrate comparable progress. The case therefore makes Kriminalamt’s public claim of success part of a larger struggle over who has the right to investigate—and who gets credit for solving—the murders.

Role in the investigation

The narrative presents Kriminalamt as an agency with the resources and authority to assume control of the serial-murder case. That position is not the same as having already solved it: when Harry confronts Bellman, he points out that his team traced the rope used to kill Marit Olsen, followed leads to Elias Skog and the Hävasshütte, and found Adele Vetlesen. Harry contrasts those discoveries with the agency’s inability, in his account, to show a comparable result after two months of investigation.

The contrast is sharpened by Adele’s false travel trail. Harry explains that someone travelled from Oslo using a passport bearing Adele’s name, then presented a genuine passport at Kigali, where the name on the ticket would not necessarily be checked against the passport. This reconstruction belongs to Harry’s investigation, not to a breakthrough attributed to Kriminalamt. The distinction matters: the agency can claim formal command of the case while another team supplies findings that alter its understanding.

Authority and jurisdictional conflict

Bellman warns Harry that continuing his work has put both Harry and his superior, Gunnar Hagen, at risk of losing their jobs and facing disciplinary charges. He points to the apparent impropriety of searching for a missing person at the rope factory linked to Marit’s murder, and tells Harry that he will not get another chance. The threat turns the investigation into an institutional confrontation: the dispute is not only about what the evidence means, but also about whether Harry’s team was entitled to pursue it.

Harry answers that he and Hagen can explain their actions to the Minister of Justice by setting out what they uncovered, including Adele as a fourth victim. Bellman does not answer Harry’s challenge about whether those results might influence the minister’s view of which body is better equipped to investigate murders. Instead, he warns Harry not to overestimate his position. The exchange leaves the agency’s authority intact in practice, but exposes how vulnerable its claim to investigative superiority is to findings made outside its own effort.

Bellman’s team and takeover

After returning to Norway and joining Kriminalamt, Bellman recruits Jussi Kolkka and then brings Truls Berntsen back into the fold. Kolkka’s earlier career helps define the team Bellman is assembling: he had worked for Europol and as a police officer in Helsinki, but left Europol after using extreme force against a suspect in a rape investigation, prompting the suspect’s lawyer to threaten legal action. Truls tries to draw more detail from him, but Kolkka remains silent. The episode supplies a concrete, troubling indication of the methods and histories represented within Bellman’s new group, without establishing that Kriminalamt as a whole endorses Kolkka’s past conduct.

Truls later treats the agency’s takeover as a victory. At Justisen, he calls for attention as a news broadcast reports the arrest; Kriminalamt’s people fall silent to hear the announcement. His celebration reflects loyalty to the institution and to the team formed around Bellman. It also sits uneasily beside Harry’s account of who found the decisive leads: the agency’s victory is clear to its supporters, while the attribution of the investigative work remains contested.

Arrest and public account

Bellman speaks outside the agency’s building in Bryn after Kriminalamt announces that it has arrested a man suspected of five murders, including Marit Olsen’s. He stresses that finding a culprit and securing a conviction are different achievements. As justification for the immediate arrest, he cites the number of indications and correspondences uncovered by the agency’s investigation, together with the risks of further violence and concealment. The arrest is thus presented as a preventive and investigative decision, not as proof of guilt or a completed legal case.

Asked about the suspect, Bellman discloses only that the man is around thirty and had previously been convicted of aggravated assault. His limited answer preserves the distinction between public announcement and fuller disclosure. The broadcast gives Kriminalamt a visible victory, but Bellman’s own qualification—that arrest and conviction are separate—also marks the limits of what that announcement establishes.

Institutional significance

Kriminalamt’s role is defined through a tension between official control and disputed credit. Bellman can threaten disciplinary consequences, speak for the agency, and present an arrest as the result of its investigation; Harry can counter with specific discoveries that challenge the impression of institutional superiority. Meanwhile, Truls’s celebration shows how quickly an arrest becomes a collective triumph for the people inside the agency, even before the suspect’s guilt has been established.

The evidence does not provide a detailed organizational chart or establish that every discovery made by Harry’s team was formally adopted by Kriminalamt. Instead, it shows the agency through its actions in this case: Bellman’s recruitment of personnel, the assertion of investigative authority, the announcement of an arrest, and the ensuing contest over the account of how the case advanced. That limited but pointed portrait makes Kriminalamt both a law-enforcement institution and a participant in the struggle to define the investigation’s success.