At this very moment alleged “super hacker” Gottfrid Svartholm is being held in a Danish prison on suspicion of hacking into the computers of IT company CSC.
The trial is expected to begin in the early days of September, more than four months from today and close to ten months since he was extradited to Denmark from Sweden in 2013. But while one might presume that the authorities already have everything they need to prosecute Svartholm, it appears that their investigation is still very much a work in progress.
It’s no secret that Gottfrid’s last days of freedom were spent in Cambodia, a country that he came to call home and where he’d built a life and found work. Now, some 20 months since he left the country, the police investigation into his activities there have been revived. And, according to one of their targets, the manner in which it’s being carried out is a cause for concern.
John, who has asked us not to use his full real name, is a former colleague of Gottfrid who lives and works in Cambodia. TorrentFreak has confirmed his identity and the fact that he and Gottfrid did business together. On April 2 he received an unexpected telephone call about someone he hasn’t seen for years.
Mysterious police threats
“The person who spoke to me on the phone was threatening and aggressive. He spoke with a thick European accent and initially said he was ‘with Nordic police’,” John explains.
“At that point I didn’t think I was speaking to an actual policeman because really, ‘Nordic police’ is about as evasive as an introduction can possibly be. After I repeatedly asked for more details, he only specified ‘Swedish police’. No name, no badge number.”
John was told he needed to go to a meeting to discuss Gottfrid but with such a mysterious introduction he was concerned at what might be waiting for him, including this not being genuine police business.
“I felt uncomfortable with the situation, and due to the way the call had been handled up to that point, I didn’t want to meet them. I had no idea whether I was even speaking to a real policeman,” John explains. “I asked if this meeting was voluntary, and he specifically said that they would ‘use local police to force’ me into meeting them.”
John was informed that the meeting would consist of him, the mystery Swedish policeman, a local Cambodian policeman, and a Danish policeman.
“They allowed me to choose the location, but said it had to be the same day. I chose a very public cafe for my own safety,” he says. Due to the apparent urgency of the situation, John had no time to arrange for a lawyer to be present.
Once the call had ended, John contacted his embassy but was informed that there was little they could do to help. Although apprehensive he decided to attend the meeting, set for the lobby bar in the Hotel Cambodiana.
Meeting in the hotel
“When I turned up to the meeting, the guy who threatened me on the phone wasn’t there, and instead there was Jens Jorgensen from the Danish police and Anders Riisager [pictured right, different occasion], who introduced himself as ‘Copenhagen Deputy District Attorney’,” John explains, adding that neither would reveal the identity of the person who made the earlier threats.
With the meeting underway, John reports that Anders was being “nice” and apologized for the earlier telephone threats while clarifying it was neither of them. Most of their questions were “unanswerable”, as they were “based on the type of thing that one wouldn’t remember from three years ago, such as what kind of computer Gottfrid used, etc.”
The million-dollar PC-access question
However, police also showed an interest in who had access to Gottfrid’s computer in Cambodia. This is of particular interest because it was on this point that Gottfrid had his Swedish ‘Logica’ conviction overturned after the Court of Appeal couldn’t rule out that someone else accessed his computer to commit crimes.
“I was threatened and bullied into attending this questioning, and yet they completely ignored the answers when it wasn’t what they wanted to hear. A good example is that they asked if anyone else had access to [Gottfrid's] computer. When I said yes, they didn’t even ask for a full detailed list of people, not that I’d have one though, it was years ago,” John explains.
“The simple fact is that there were 50+ people with direct physical access to [Gottfrid's] computer at the time that the police were asking about. They were visibly pissed off [when I told them that], and given the threats that had already been made, it was an uncomfortable situation for me to say the least.”
Why has it taken so long?
Considering how closely John worked with Gottfrid it seems extremely unlikely that the police had no interest in him before this month, especially in respect of providing information in the crucial days leading up to and after Gottfrid’s arrest in August/September 2012. Yet this was the first time police had asked him anything.
“The implication that this isn’t something they had already looked into earlier on is just bizarre. This was the first time I’ve ever been questioned by police in relation to anything concerning Gottfrid,” John says.
“The most shocking part of the whole thing was just how ridiculous their questions were. These people are traveling around to third world countries refusing to identify themselves, making threats that border on being criminal, all so they can ask about rumors and hearsay that dates back over three years.”
Desperate times?
“You can all say what you want about Gottfrid, but the fact is, the actions of the people investigating this case are clearly the actions of desperate people who are grasping at straws. If they had any evidence, they wouldn’t need to go around behaving the way they are,” he says.
Describing the whole episode as “shocking and outrageous”, John says that he hopes some good will come out of making his experiences public.
“Gottfrid isn’t someone I feel I owe anything to, but this whole investigation is clearly ridiculous and without merit. It could have been any one of a whole bunch of people [with access to Gottfrid's computer] and they know it. I don’t want to cause problems for myself, but I’d like to see Gottfrid get treated like a human being.”
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.
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