The secret orders to move Hoffmann within Aspsås Prison turn prison procedure into a means of controlling both a prisoner and the truth about him. As Lennart Oscarsson later recounts, he was instructed to facilitate a lawyer’s visit to Stefan Lygas, prevent Ewert Grens and other officers from reaching Piet Hoffmann, return Hoffmann to the unit he had left despite the threat against him, and keep the gates shut even if Hoffmann demanded their opening while hostages were at risk. The orders’ author is never identified; their significance lies in the coordinated pressure they exert and in the danger they create.

Conditions Inside Aspsås

Hoffmann’s arrival at Aspsås was his first entry into the high-security prison, though he had already studied its buildings from a church tower and, with Erik Wilson’s help, learned about the people and corridors of Block G. On arrival, guards escorted him through a security entrance, removed his restraints, searched him, and issued him ill-fitting prison clothes. The formal process established a new confinement; the secret orders would later manipulate where that confinement placed him and who could reach him. The closed institution controlled time and contact as well as movement. After ten days, Hoffmann had spent twenty-three hours a day in a small cell, without visitors or ordinary media. When he was shown his unit, he learned its routines, including the seven-thirty lock-in. He then chose a visible place in the television corner before the other prisoners returned: he wanted to be seen as someone who did not hide or wait for permission to take a place. His calculated performance mattered because status in the unit depended not only on official records but on how other prisoners read a newcomer. At supper, two older prisoners challenged him to produce his papers. Stefan Lygas and Karol Tomasz Penderecki had already prepared the ground, talking about Hoffmann’s arrival and obtaining copies of records through Stefan’s lawyer. Hoffmann had identified them as members of Wojtek who could help him remove competitors, but who might also kill him if they discovered that he was Paula. The prison’s paperwork and its informal power structure therefore converged around the identity he was trying to sustain.

The Orders and Their Sequence

Oscarsson later disclosed that, on the evening before Grens came to the prison, he had been ordered to let a lawyer visit Stefan, who was in Hoffmann’s unit and had attacked him. Stefan was shot the following morning. Oscarsson explained that lawyers can be used to carry information into a prison; the visit was thus not merely a private legal appointment in the context he described. The account does not establish what information the lawyer carried, or who arranged the visit, but it links an apparently ordinary channel of access to the concealed struggle around Hoffmann. Oscarsson was also instructed to stop Grens—or any other police officer—from questioning or meeting Hoffmann. To carry out that instruction, he stood in reception and told Grens that Hoffmann was in the hospital unit and would remain there for another three or four days. The explanation diverted the investigator from the prisoner while concealing the fact that the restriction itself had been ordered. Oscarsson’s account makes clear that the obstacle was not simply a routine delay: he had been told to prevent access. A further order required Oscarsson to move Hoffmann back to the unit he had come from, although a threatened prisoner should not be returned there. The placement order therefore contradicted the protective logic of prison procedure. Earlier, when Hoffmann faced the danger of exposure, ten members of the prison riot squad had escorted him from Block G to the voluntary-isolation unit in Block C; four escorted him while six remained behind to deter further violence. Isolation separated him from prisoners in other units, but the later instruction sought to reverse that separation and send him back into the environment from which he had been removed.

The Crisis and the Refusal to Open the Gates

The last instruction concerned the crisis itself: Oscarsson was told not to open the gates if Hoffmann demanded that he and the hostages be allowed out. It extended the pattern from controlling access to Hoffmann to controlling the possibility of his escape, even when hostages were involved. In the conversation where Oscarsson reveals the orders, Mariana Hermansson presses him to identify who gave them. He does not name anyone. Instead, he says he wants Martin Jacobson to live, bringing the human stakes of the instruction into the room without resolving its source. Hermansson later tells Grens what Oscarsson had disclosed: the lawyer’s visit, the efforts to prevent police contact, the order to return Hoffmann to the unit where he had been threatened, and the direction to keep the gates closed even if he asked for them to open. She explains that she had the information but did not get it to Grens in time, and that after the explosion it had seemed irrelevant to raise. The delayed disclosure changes the meaning of the prison’s decisions: what could have appeared to be isolated administrative choices is revealed as a sequence of instructions bearing directly on Hoffmann’s safety and the handling of the crisis.

The Larger Pattern of Concealment

The orders remain connected to a larger system in which official investigations and secret intelligence accounts could diverge. Grens later finds 302 confidential intelligence reports from the preceding year describing informant work that exposed one crime while other crimes were marginalized. He recognizes cases in which investigations had collapsed despite relevant information already being held internally. In one discussion, he tells prosecutor Lars Ågestam that Ågestam had been involved in twenty-three cases that had closed without the information contained in the secret reports. These disclosures do not identify who issued Oscarsson’s orders, but they place the prison episode within a pattern of concealed decision-making and incomplete official records. The Swedish Police Service is described as having used criminals as covert human intelligence sources while denying and concealing the cooperation. The accompanying account says that crimes could be sidelined so that other crimes could be investigated, leaving preliminary investigations and trials without correct information. It also describes criminal-intelligence records and reports being used to construct credible backgrounds for informants. Against that institutional backdrop, the instructions at Aspsås show secrecy operating through ordinary mechanisms—visits, access restrictions, transfers, and locked gates. Their force comes not from a named commander or an openly stated rationale, but from the fact that each order could be presented as an administrative act while its combined effect was to isolate Hoffmann from protection and obstruct scrutiny.