HS analysis The most stopping corruption case in Finnish history is coming to an end – the darkest secrets of Jari Aarnio’s drug police may remain an eternal mystery

Helsinki former head of the drug police Jari Aarnion the massive torture begins to end when the Helsinki Court of Appeal announced its views on Aarnio’s murder charges on Friday.

The lawsuit was about whether Aarnio knowingly failed to prevent the underworld’s assassination in 2003 and whether the act was worthy of a murder conviction. The Court of Appeal concluded that Aarnio had no special legal obligation to prevent the murder, even though he knew the plot in advance.

Aarnio had no information that the victim was in imminent danger of death, the court held. He did not seem to know where and when or how the murder was to take place.

Murdered is probably the last major trial in Jari Aarnio’s massive tortoise, which has continued in various ways for 10 to 15 years.

For a long time, some people have been asking why state funds have been wasted in sanctifying Aarnio’s actions even after the first long verdict. The simple answer is that the law requires the authorities to investigate suspected crimes, especially serious ones.

In addition, the murder case has played an important role in the whole, where the police, prosecutors and courts have investigated perhaps the most stagnant corruption case in Finnish history.

Aarnion the alley run started in 2007 with an official criminal investigation into shoemaking, but the ensuing criminal cases can be divided into three parts based on their significance.

In the drug and official crime case, it was investigated whether a high-class drug offender had acted at the head of the Helsinki Drug Police – a key position in Finnish criminal intelligence. The court found that this was indeed the case. It sentenced Aarnio to a maximum of 13 years’ imprisonment for, among other things, official, drug and bribery offenses.

A special feature of Aarnio’s drug story was that his subordinates were willing to lie about Aarnio’s actions even as witnesses. For this reason, the two subordinates have been prosecuted themselves, but that case has not yet been heard in the courts.

Read more: HS analysis: Police and the underworld fell silent for years, but everything changes in Jari Aarnio’s murder

Drug- and after the civil service case, the court dealt with the case of the senior police, which forms the second part of the report. It opened up a view of the structural corruption of the Helsinki police, which enabled Aarnio to operate.

The case revealed that the drug police headed by Aarnio had destroyed the names of underworld sources from the Helsinki police data source register and illegally left the sources unregistered for years. The police above and below Aarnio did not react to the worrying information and did not fill their own plots in the information source business.

Read more: HS analysis: Court finally finds information that dispels the aura of criminal mystery around Jari Aarnio’s case

In addition to Aarnio, his subjects were convicted in the case Petri Rainiala breach of duty and a retired police commander Jukka Riikonen negligent misconduct.

Third and the last entity is a Swedish-Turkish criminal Volkan Ünsalin murder. As a result, four men have already been convicted in the early 2000s, but in a new round of investigations, Aarnio and a former criminal boss Keijo Vilhusen possible roles behind the scenes of a criminal conspiracy.

Ünsal’s new murder investigation first seemed to blow to the gloom of the darkest side of the Helsinki drug police. For years, information about the questionable means used by the unit to control the underworld had been leaked to the police and the underworld, among others.

Several parties have said, for example, that the drug police protected their sources of information from criminal suspicions and knowingly endangered the lives of underworld men by hinting at criminals that another criminal would be a source of police information.

The activities of the Helsinki Drug Police have appeared to be one of the darkest chapters of the Finnish rule of law in recent decades, but a large part of the police crimes that may be related to them are already obsolete.

The exception was the suspected homicide, the Ünsal murder, in 2003.

Yet during the pre-trial phase, it was suspected that Aarnio’s information would also have come to the knowledge of his subordinates after the murder. One of them was a criminal convoy Kari Kauppiwho was on tour in the Helsinki murder group.

The suspicion was that Kauppi would have called the cloakroom from the telephone booth after the pay murder about the act and looked around when colleagues could not find out the caller.

However, Kauppi’s right to prosecute a possible official crime had time to expire before the trial. The Helsinki District Court also ruled in December 2020 that it could not be confirmed as a subordinate as a caller. Now the Court of Appeal came to the same conclusion.

In addition, preliminary information about Aarnio’s murder was suspected to have been retrospectively brought to the attention of Petri Rainiala, who was convicted in a civil service criminal case, but the prosecutor decided not to prosecute Rainialaa even before the trial.

The indications of the pre-trial investigation that the then Criminal Prosecutor of the Violent Crime Unit and the current Member of Parliament were also obscure or irrelevant Kari Tolvanen (kok) would have liked to interrupt the investigation of the strange clue and had been dealing with the real tenant of the murder apartment even before the murder.

Tva has never been suspected or accused of a crime.

Read more: Preliminary investigation into the murder of Jari Aarnio: Current MP Kari Tolvanen gave the Ombudsman false information about the Vuosaari murder investigation as a police officer

I’m sorry thus, the murder did not become a new scandal shaking the Helsinki police, as no evidence was found of the involvement of Aarnio’s subordinates or colleagues in the dirty play of the police. By the time he reached the appellate stage, the murder case had been reduced to another new trial that ruled Aarnio’s activities.

The district and appellate courts agreed that Aarnio had received information about the conspiracy from Keijo Vilhuss months before the murder. He had already learned at that time of the involvement of one murderer, the court held.

Within months, Vilhunen kept Aarnio informed of the progress of the murder plot. However, according to the Court of Appeal, Aarnio did not have such detailed information that he should have understood the threat of homicide to be imminent.

Immediate danger to Aarnion should have been averted under the Police Act like other police officers. On the other hand, Aarnio had no obligation under the law or any other provision to combat the general threat of homicide. Therefore, he could not be convicted.

The Court of Appeal did not find as much evidence of Aarnio’s activities as the District Court had found. So there are now a pile of loose pieces on the table, which, according to the Court of Appeal, do not give a clear picture.

Fresh the verdict gives one view of what Jari Aarnio did during the assassination of Volka Ünsal. On the other hand, the verdict – or very many others concerning Aarnio – has not been able to reveal the means used by the Helsinki Drug Police to control the Finnish underworld since the 1990s at the latest.

It is still obscure when Aarnio started committing crimes for his own benefit and what he has had to do over the years.

There are indications that Aarnio had unclear co-operation with high-class criminals as early as the late 1990s. For years, however, he was able to dispel any suspicion by attacking towards colleagues and others who asked embarrassing questions.

Aarnio also had money flowing from some dark source all the time that the investigation was able to find out – that is, for ten years since 2003. The hash barrel story explained only a couple of years about this obscure income stream.

It is certain that many have paid dearly for Aarnio’s activities. For example, several of Aarnio’s own subordinates have been fired in an effort to protect their former boss.

Read more: Was Jari Aarnio’s heroic story a lie from a grenade attack in the backyard?

Different The trial and pre-trial materials in the Aarnio cases have produced an incredible amount of information and various clues about the questionable style of action of the drug police.

As a result of the trials, the language populations of men in the underworld have begun to soften, and some information has also come to some extent from the police. However, given the drama of the events, Aarnio’s subjects have been confusingly silent.

This, too, may indicate that the activities of not all subordinates can withstand the light of day.

A new grand trial of Aarnio-led drug police is hardly seen anymore. At the same time, the darkest secrets of the Helsinki Drug Police may remain an eternal mystery.