Grens and Ågestam investigate and expose the secret intelligence cover-up

Ewert Grens and Lars Ågestam investigate and expose a secret intelligence system operating alongside official criminal investigations: reports held the fuller account of crimes and informant activity, while investigators and prosecutors worked with incomplete files. Grens turns that split record into evidence, confronting Ågestam with cases in which the missing information mattered and securing a commitment to pursue arrests reaching into senior government. The revelation is not simply that information was secret, but that secrecy had consequences for what the justice system could know and prove.

The parallel record

The inquiry takes shape around the contrast between an ordinary case file and a secret intelligence report. At Västmannagatan 79, Grens asks Göransson for the report describing what actually happened. He later searches for it on a computer and compares it with a thin file containing the same incident. The official material is incomplete; it is the information available to Grens, Sven Sundkvist, Mariana Hermansson, and Ågestam, and it had helped lead to the investigation being downgraded. The two records refer to the same event, but do not offer the same account.

Grens widens his search beyond that murder investigation, looking back exactly one year through 302 secret intelligence reports. They describe a recurring complication: an informant’s work to uncover one crime could give rise to another. Grens recognizes some reports as connected to investigations that had collapsed even though relevant knowledge had already been held inside the police system. The material therefore exposes a division between what the institution knew in one capacity and what its official investigations could use.

The reports were not merely supplementary notes to the public files. Grens characterizes them as a second investigative track, one reserved for police management, while the formal inquiries proceeded without the complete account. In one example he raises with Ågestam, an official case concerns a serious drug offense in a Regeringsgatan parking lot; the secret report, written by a police officer outside the investigation, describes what actually happened. The shared address and timing make the mismatch difficult to dismiss as a separate incident: the location and circumstances align, while the account available to investigators does not.

From files to a pattern

The discovery becomes more consequential as Grens places separate cases beside one another. At a meeting in Ågestam’s kitchen, shortly after four in the morning, Grens opens a briefcase and lays three files on the table. They are examples rather than the full archive. He explains that the same addresses and times can yield a different truth in the secret record, then identifies the Regeringsgatan drug case as one instance of that division. His method is comparative: the official file is not assessed in isolation, but tested against the information kept outside it.

Grens makes the scale explicit by identifying these examples as three of 302 cases from the previous year. The secret reports, he argues, contain crimes that were swept aside so other crimes could be solved. That formulation describes a system in which informant work could be treated as useful intelligence while its consequences remained absent from the investigations and prosecutions that followed. A case might be officially pursued on partial information even though a fuller account existed elsewhere within the institution.

The records also reverse the meaning of an investigative failure. What appeared in an official file to be a case that could not be proved may, beside the secret report, look like a case deprived of information that could have identified or implicated an informant. Grens does not present the reports as an abstract administrative concern: they concern actual crimes, actual investigations, and the ability of police and prosecutors to establish what happened. Their parallel existence makes the incompleteness itself part of the evidence.

Ågestam confronted with the record

Grens directs the comparison at Ågestam, a prosecutor whose work intersected with the concealed information. He tells him that he was involved in 23 of the cases in which prosecutions were unsuccessful. Grens’s explanation is that Ågestam closed those cases without all the information contained in the real, secret report—the material that would have exposed the informant. The accusation is serious, but it distinguishes Ågestam’s role from the deliberate withholding Grens is uncovering: the prosecutor’s decisions were made without the complete account.

Ågestam acknowledges that he received 302 secret intelligence reports. The exchange does not erase the gap between possessing a body of reports and having the relevant facts available in each official case. Instead, Grens presses on the consequence: the ordinary investigators and prosecutors could not present what they had not been told. He places their constrained work beside the secret record and asks Ågestam to consider the disparity between the resources spent investigating and the information denied to those investigations.

Grens describes the labor behind the Västmannagatan inquiry to make that disparity concrete. He estimates that he spent half his working time on the case after the alarm was raised, alongside Sundkvist and Hermansson. Nils Krantz and three colleagues spent a week searching the location with magnifying glasses and fingerprint-lifting tape. A colleague devoted comparable time to examining the Danish victim’s body, while constables and detectives guarded the scene, questioned neighbors, and searched rubbish for bloody shirts for an estimated twenty days. The details mark the human and institutional effort invested in the official inquiry, an effort proceeding without the truth preserved in the other file.

Accountability and the promised next step

When Ågestam asks what Grens is trying to accomplish, Grens answers that he wants to solve a murder. He also makes clear that solving it is bound up with a refusal to carry guilt for what has happened. The investigation thus shifts from retrieving a secret report to deciding what can be done with the concealed record. Grens does not treat discovery as sufficient; he wants the evidence to produce a response.

That response reaches beyond ordinary police officers. Grens tells Ågestam that prosecution would involve a commanding officer, an even higher-ranking officer, and a state secretary. He points to security-camera footage from Rosenbad showing five people entering an office and to a recording of five voices in a closed meeting. These materials support his assurance that there is enough evidence, while also showing that the matter extends into senior official circles. The significance of the hidden reports is therefore institutional: the question of who knew, who acted, and who was protected cannot be confined to the detectives whose investigations were weakened.

Ågestam agrees to move forward, saying he will arrange arrest warrants within three days. The commitment gives the confrontation a practical outcome, though the evidence here establishes a promised next step rather than the arrests themselves. Grens has connected the secret reports to failed cases, quantified Ågestam’s involvement, and brought recordings and surveillance material to bear on higher-ranking officials. The episode ends with the parallel record no longer merely a hidden archive: it has become the basis for an intended prosecution.