Mystery in Oslo Plaza hotel 1995

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Mystery in Oslo Plaza hotel 1995

Postby Handsome B. Wonderful » Fri Jan 17, 2020 10:28 pm

https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/x ... oslo-plaza

Sounds like a drug deal or human trafficking thing gone wrong or she was an international spy ring asset who no longer was of use. :shrug:
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Re: Mystery in Oslo Plaza hotel 1995

Postby cptmarginal » Wed Mar 11, 2020 11:22 pm

Among the theories the police considered were whether Jennifer Fergate might have been an intelligence agent or if she might have been assigned to liquidate someone.

Security guards and agents were not unusual guests at Oslo Plaza, which often hosted government leaders.

During the peace process between Israel and PLO in 1992 and 1993, which led the Oslo Agreement, many secret meetings took place at the Oslo Plaza under tight security from both sides.

Might something have taken place at the luxury hotel in 1995 that could have resulted in a weapon being used?

"We had follow-up meetings after the Oslo Agreement both in 1994 and 1995, but not at the end of May/early June. Nor were there other peace talks or processes in that period where tensions were so high that an attack would have been a concern," says Jan Egeland, who was then a state secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a central figure in the Oslo peace process.

Ola Kaldager was head of the top-secret Norwegian intelligence group E14 for a decade around the turn of the millennium.

"Norway, Sweden and Austria were typical ‘safe havens’ where intelligence services could hold meetings and work in peace," Kaldager says. "They were open, benign and naive countries, easy to travel to, with good infrastructure and little police control. A lot probably happened that the public never heard about."

He was the head of 140 top-secret Norwegian agents who clandestinely gathered information in countries where Norwegian soldiers might be deployed. The “Section for Special Gathering” was the shadowy name of the intelligence unit that closed in 2006.

What happens if an intelligence agent dies in a foreign country?

Well-known agencies like MI6 or the CIA would probably ask to have the agent returned, but for some services it would be typical for a dead person not to be reported missing. The agency might notify the family of what happened and pay them a nice compensation, while the family would have to promise to never talk about what happened.

Is it possible for trained people to get past a locked hotel door?

"All such systems have a power circuit, and that can be manipulated," he says.

Removing identifying labels in clothing – is that something you recognize from your world?

"Yes, but an intelligence agent would probably have cut out the logos with a razor blade, so no one could see that anything was removed. But whether she did it or someone else did, someone was very good at removing evidence, since this woman has remained unidentified for 22 years," says Kaldager, pointing out that organized Eastern European criminals can be just as professional as intelligence services.


Fascinating; neglected to thank you when this was first posted.

What an in-depth investigation. I haven't yet read the whole article (or watched the documentary) but this part caught my eye:

We do, however, get an important bit of information from one of the local police stations.

Since interviews with foreign news media have to be cleared at a higher level, which can take a long time, all we are offered is a background interview, on condition we don’t use the name of the inspector we meet.

He has a possible explanation of why the Plaza woman was never officially sought as a missing person. It was something we never considered.

"Until the mid-’90s we had two different police authorities in Belgium: the police and the gendarmerie. When someone reported a missing person, they were almost always told to wait 24 hours, because many people turned up within the first full day. Communication between the two services was not perfect. The Dutroux case changed everything. You remember Dutroux?" asks the police inspector.

Yes, we do. It was one of Europe’s worst-ever sexual abuse cases. Belgian Marc Dutroux was sentenced to life in prison after kidnapping, torturing and sexually abusing six young girls in the mid-1990s. Four of the girls were killed. It was a national scandal.

"The Dutroux case led to missing persons cases being handled differently, not just in Belgium but in a number of European countries. The case was a watershed," explains the policeman.

"Does that mean missing persons reports filed before the Dutroux case might have been put aside or not taken seriously in Belgium and other countries?"

"That could have happened. Everything was different before Dutroux," he says.

The policeman asks if we knew that the first two victims in the Dutroux case were from here?

From here?

"Yes, the little girls Julie and Melissa were kidnapped just a few kilometres from here, in Grâce-Hollogne. I thought that was why you came?" says the inspector.

It turns out that the Dutroux case started right here. The memorial to the two murdered eight-year-olds is just a few hundred metres from our hotel.

The girls were kidnapped on 24 June 1995, three weeks after the Plaza woman died, but the sexual predator Dutroux wasn’t caught until the following year.

So if someone reported the Plaza woman missing in 1995, it was under the old rules, those in place before the Dutroux scandal shook Europe.

In theory it could be that a missing persons report was stuffed into a drawer in a local police office somewhere in Europe without ever making it into the centralized registries.
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Re: Mystery in Oslo Plaza hotel 1995

Postby Handsome B. Wonderful » Fri Mar 13, 2020 9:54 pm

Cool beans man.

Stuff like this interests me and bothers me. Bothers me in the sense that I want to know what happened. Like the lost Panama girls, what happened? What REALLY happened? I watched about 2 or 3 YT documentaries on the Oslo case and I have that empty feeling, wishing I could solve it.
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The grandeur fades, the meaning never known- 'Born' Nevermore
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Re: Mystery in Oslo Plaza hotel 1995

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Mar 13, 2020 10:29 pm

Thanks for bumping this thread cpt, and thank you Handsome, for posting that great synopsis of all that's transpired in the case. I remember this case well and feel sure she was murdered. Boy, I read as much as I could about this murder mystery at the time and this is the first time I've learned how shamefully inadequate the police investigation was. I'm glad the reporters took interest in researching it further but sad they've decided to let it lie. Or left it a lie.
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