Erik Strand, August 31 2014
In an article on the Norwegian news website ABC nyheter, a news reportage in the Norwgian TV channel TV 2 is exposed as fraudulent. The news reportage from 1996 covered the death of engineer and whistleblower Jan Wiborg. For some background on the death of Jan Wiborg, one can read here.
In 1996 TV 2 journalist Stein Kåre Kristiansen went to Copenhagen because Member of Parliament Hallgrim Berg (Conservative Party) had insinuated that engineer Jan Wiborg could have been killed. Stein Kåre Kristiansen is the son of Kåre Kristiansen (1920-2005), who was the president of the Christian Democratic Party in the periods 1975-1977 and 1979-1983.
Hallgrim Berg had received the report from the Danish investigation of Jan Wiborg’s death from an anonymous person, and found the report to be weakly founded. Berg claimed that Wiborg had been trapped by someone who wanted to assasinate him, and wanted a new investigation.
Posing outside hotel Cabinn in the street Danasvej in Copenhagen, where Wiborg died, Kristiansen said that there were no evidence supporting Berg’s claim that Wiborg was murdered. After standing outside the hotel, Kristiansen seemingly moves inside the hotel and interviews Rune Gitz Johansen, without Wiborg’s name being mentioned.
Rune Gitz Johansen explains what kind of key system the hotel uses. If someone had walked in or out of room 307, where Wiborg stayed the night he died in June 1994, it would have been registered electronically. The pictures from TV 2 then shows the door which Kristiansen claims is the door to Wiborg’s room.
But ABC Nyheter exposes that the hotel door and the key which Kristiansen shows in the TV 2 reportage, is situated at another Cabinn hotel in Copenhagen – in Vodroffsvej, several quarters away (see pictures of two different doors to room 307 in two different Cabinn hotels in the ABC nyheter article).
According to Rune Gitz-Johansen, who was interviewed by TV 2, the TV 2 team was aware that they were at an other hotel than the hotel where Wiborg died:
– I was interviewed at Cabinn in Vodroffsvej, because that is where I have my office. But they knew well that it happened in Danasvei. I believe that they filmed there too.
According to the article in ABC Nyheter, Gitz-Johansen explained to Kristiansen that there were different key systems on the two hotels – a Norwegian Twin-system in Vodroffsvej and an American system in Danasvej, where Wiborg lived. On the hotel in Danasvej it was not possible to registrate the activity in the door.
Wiborg’s door and the system was described in the report written by Danish police after Wiborg’s death. To ABC Nyheter Kristiansen claims that he had not read the Danish police report, even though his channel had made a story about it one day earlier, when they interviewed Hallgrim Berg. Kristiansen says:
-No, I did not ask about it. I had a plan where I was going to Copenhagen and back again on the same day.
According to ABC Nyheter, Kristiansen finds it difficult to answer why he is filmed outside the hotel where Wiborg fell out of the window, while room 307 is filmed at a hotel some quartes away. Kristiansen reminds that it is 17 years ago:
– I am a bit insecure how it was. I felt convinced that the room I was shown by the receptionist, was the room Wiborg lived in. But I do not know. I did not check it. I had no reason to believe that it was another room that I saw, either.
Knut Lindh, autor of the book “Hvem drepte Jan Wiborg?” (Who killed Jan Wiborg?) says that the consequence of Kristiansen’s reportage was that Norwegian media put the case away for years.
– For if the door to his hotel room was electronically closed, and nobody had walked in or out, it had to be a suicide.
Fampo 