True crime – the unsolved murders of the Orderudfamily and the connection with the Kosovo war

Are we willing to look at the Orderud Case again?

The convicts in the Orderud murders have been released and have claimed that they will fight to prove their innocence.

At the same time as the murders took place, the war in the Balkans was at its most intense. Norway contributed with a staggering amount of money to the war in Kosovo. No one has succeeded in getting an answer as to what the money went to.

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Norwegian broadcasting tried to look into the murdercase

In March 2009, I was contacted by NRK. (The Norwegian broadcasting) Journalist Ebbe Ording saw a link between the “money trail” and an in-house production NRK was working on. This was a Focus program on the Orderud case. The murder of Anne Orderud Paust and her family is the most famous murder case in Norway, and for many still a mystery. The inquiry from NRK made me investigate the “money trail” further.

Timeline Orderud case

In short, the Orderud case began as early as 15 July 1998 when Anne Orderud Paust, the Minister of Defense’s personal secretary, discovered an object attached under her car. Police found that she had driven around with half a kilo of explosives. A month later, on August 12, someone tried to start a fire in the house where Anne Orderud Paust and her husband, Per Paust, lived. After this assassination attempt, it became known that Per Paust had also been subjected to an assault in 1996.

Fleeing to USA

On September 3, Per Paust and Anne Orderud Paust moved to New York, where Per Paust acted as Consul General for four months. The police described the situation for the couple as unsafe. Before the trip to the United States, they were for a time placed in a secure residence in a military camp. In January 1999, they were back in Oslo, where the police, for unknown reasons, ended the extra security measures that had been established around the couple.

Radioactive radiation

On May 6, Per Paust died of a very acute illness, (the theory was that he was exposed to radioactive radiation, which led to acute cancer) and a few weeks later, on May 22, Anne Orderud Paust and her parents were shot and killed on the farm Orderud in Sørum.

What kind of connection does the triple murder actually have to the war in Kosovo?

Was Per Paust an agent for the security service?

Per Paust worked in the security policy department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, journalist Ebbe Ording states in the Focus documentary that he received confirmation from several sources that the Paust couple worked for the military Intelligence Service, headquartered in Lutvann, and both were included in what happened in the Balkans this spring.

The secret service was hiding information

During a random check of the E-service’s archives in August 1998, the EOS committee (the Storting’s (The Norwegian parlament) control organ for intelligence, surveillance and security services) discovered a secret instruction made as early as 1997 by the then Minister of Defence, Jørgen Kosmo. Kosmo had decided that the EOS Committee would not have access to reports from the secret services, where foreign services were involved.

One does not need to be particularly up-to-date on the topic to understand that co-operation with foreign intelligence is more often the rule than the exception. The EOS committee thus, without knowing it, had virtually no control over our secret services. The instructions apply to this day.

Denied access

When, during the period surrounding the NATO bombing, the Committee requested closer inspection of the arrangements made by the intelligence services in the Balkans, the feedback was of such a nature that the Committee believed that they had not received additional information. And it was true. The Norwegian Intelligence service withheld parts of the reports with reference to Kosmo’s instructions.

Norway used an enormously amount of money in the Kosovo war

NATO’s air bombing of Serbia began on March 24, 1999. After 78 days, it ended in a brief and intense ground war 4-12. June.

The Norwegian force contribution in Kosovo was unknown for a long time, but it is a fact that during 1999 we spent a total of NOK 1,786 million (Norwegian krone – 1790 million euros or 192.715400 dollars) on our military activities in Kosovo. If you break down the numbers, they show that as much as 1.056 billion (106 mill euros) was used in the operating area itself.

Considering that we only had approx. 1300 KFOR soldiers and 24 special forces – FSK (with logistics and support – a total of 150 men) in Kosovo, the number seems high. For comparison, we used approx. NOK 1,000 million during a year in Afghanistan, ten years later. In almost 30 years in Lebanon, we spent a total of 4.5 billion. In Kosovo, the sum for one year was 1.786 billion.

The CIA infiltrated the Norwegian OSCE

In 1999, Norway held the rotating chairmanship of the OSCE (Organization for security and Co-operation in Europe) and Foreign Minister Knut Vollebæk thus became the supreme leader of the Kosovo Verification Mission, (KVM), a neutral unit that was to monitor the fragile peace agreement in the area. The head of the KVM was William Walker, known for his past in South America, where he worked as an ambassador in El Salvador with Oliver North and the CIA.

The Sunday times documented that CIA trained the UCK

William Walker admitted in the Sunday Times:

“Overnight we increased the staff at KVM from a handful to 130 people. Could any of them have been CIA agents? Of course it was possible. It is the CIA’s job to be “present”

(The Sunday Times, March 12, 2000).

The two British journalists Tom Walker and Aidan Laverty wrote in The Sunday Times on March 11, 2000 the following:

… in the autumn / winter of 98-99, the CIA and Western special forces began an intensive rearmament and military training of the KF (UCK) …

Why did Clinton and Thaqi visit Norway shortly after the war?

Norway increased its foreign policy account significantly after the efforts in Kosovo. It became clear already in the autumn of 1999 when President Clinton came on a surprise state visit to Norway. He arrived shortly afterwards Hashim Thaqi, the leader of the KLA guerrillas, who had been visiting Bondevik. Random? maybe. What is a fact, however, is that the Orderud family was killed and that Norway spent NOK 1.7 billion in Kosovo.

What did the Paust couple know?

It has been claimed that Per Paust sat on information that he should not have had. If he or someone in his circle had at this time revealed compromising information about collusion between Western intelligence, (CIA, BND- Bundesnachrichtendienst, German security service), Norwegian authorities and the KLA (UCK)guerrillas, it would have been catastrophic for the outcome of the Kosovo war. Is it so strange to think that the Orderud Case may have a different solution than the one concluded in the Eidsivating Court of Appeal on 5 April 2002? (Where it was concluded as a father/mother/sister murder without any real motive?)

The question is not whether we should turn the stones in the Orderud case again. The question is: are we willing to take the consequences of what we find?