Homicide Squad

The Homicide Squad is the Oslo police unit that brings newly appointed officer Kari Adel into contact with Chief Inspector Simon Kefas, her assigned mentor. Although the unit’s immediate work includes murder investigations, its cases expose a wider structure in which police information, prison access, and financial arrangements have been compromised by organized crime.

Identity and Introduction

Kari introduces herself to Simon by showing him her warrant card and explaining that she has just joined the Homicide Squad. She has been told to find him because he is supposed to mentor her. When she later reaches his desk, she says she has been assigned to assist him and had already tried to locate him at the crime scene in Kuba. Her arrival establishes the unit as a place where inexperienced officers are expected to learn through active casework rather than from a distance.

Simon is initially dismissive of Kari’s prospects and assumes that a clever, ambitious recruit will soon leave the police or move into a higher-status career. Her first investigative suggestion cuts against that judgment: she proposes speaking with the dead man’s next of kin and tracing his movements before he ended up in the river. Simon asks where she would start, then offers his own explanation for having left the scene: he believes there was nothing there to find. Their exchange sets up a practical contrast between his weary skepticism and her direct, methodical approach.

Investigative Work and Corruption

The squad’s murder work takes place in a police force shadowed by long-standing rumors of an inside source. Simon tells Kari that, for years, people had speculated about a mole who leaked information to the person controlling much of Oslo’s drug and sex-trafficking activity, but no one had produced evidence that either the mole or the criminal leader existed. The suspected figure was known as the Twin. The uncertainty matters: the problem is not merely identifying a suspect but establishing how information might be moving through the force.

The scale of that corruption becomes clearer through Simon’s confrontation with Iver Iversen. Drawing on his years with the Serious Fraud Office, Simon accuses Iversen Property of doing business with the Twin: laundering proceeds from drugs and trafficking in exchange for fictitious losses that produced tax advantages worth hundreds of millions of kroner. Iversen denies knowing the Twin, while Simon says he has evidence that they worked together. The exchange places the squad’s concerns within a network extending beyond street crime into corporate finance.

A diary discovered by Markus Engseth supplies a more intimate account of the same institutional betrayal. Its writer recalls that police officers treated the mole as a single traitor, whereas the diary describes two corrupt officers who could provide each other with alibis. They had turned a blind eye to drug dealing, human trafficking, and murder. Their communications used separate Hotmail accounts accessed on stolen computers taken from the evidence room, and messages were passed through a drop at Broker’s Restaurant in Bogstadveien. The diary records the writer’s fear that there might be no path back through confession and forgiveness, as well as the decision to get out. This account exposes an organized method of concealment, not an isolated leak.

Reach Beyond the Street

The criminal network also reaches into the prison system. In one account, a prisoner formerly employed by Nestor is believed to have been killed because of concern that he might talk. The threat is presented as an example of how little evidence was needed to endanger someone: suspicion alone was enough. The speaker points to the danger of a prison control room being able to grant access to a cell, making institutional security itself a possible instrument of harm.

The conspiracy surrounding Sonny Lofthus shows how that reach could distort a murder case. Hugo Nestor had understood Yngve Morsand’s request as a demand to hire a killer, but Morsand insisted on killing his wife himself and wanted someone else to bear the blame. For three million kroner, Nestor’s side arranged the conditions that would place Sonny at the scene and helped set up the false accusation with Arild Franck. The scheme joined a private motive, criminal coordination, and corrupt prison assistance, turning the appearance of a confession into part of a larger frame-up.

Kefas’s encounter with Fidel Lae brings the unit’s concern with violence into a direct question of responsibility. He asks whether it is acceptable to use dogs to attack a young girl who is trying to escape slavery, and whether that conduct should be punished. The question connects the squad’s investigations to the people subjected to trafficking and forced confinement, rather than treating those crimes only as links in an intelligence or financial network.

Institutional Significance

The Homicide Squad is presented through the tension between its formal purpose—investigating serious crimes—and the possibility that the institutions surrounding it have been penetrated. Police information, prison access, and business transactions serve different functions in the network, but together they make investigations vulnerable and help criminals control who is exposed and who is blamed. The squad’s work therefore requires more than identifying an individual offender: it must confront the systems that can shield offenders and manufacture evidence against others.

The evidence does not establish that every member of the squad is corrupt or define its full organizational structure. Instead, it shows the unit through the cases and relationships that test its work: Kari’s entry and mentorship under Simon, the suspected police mole, the financial dealings attributed to Iversen Property, and the prison arrangements used to frame Sonny. Its narrative significance lies in that collision between investigation and institutional compromise.