Ünsal died in controversy over his involvement in the June 2002 robbery at Arlanda Airport in Stockholm.
The Helsinki District Court sentenced Aarnio to life imprisonment after finding that he had known about the murder consortium in advance and had failed in his professional duty to prevent it.
It also dismissed the charge of murder Keijo Vilhunen, former head of the United Brotherhood. The Helsinki Court of Appeal upheld the decision on Friday.
Helsingin Sanomat on Friday reminded that the murder charges were unusual for several reasons. Not even the prosecutor claimed that either of the accused was present when the victim was killed.
Initially, four men were sentenced to life imprisonment for contract murder, but as allegations of shortcomings in the investigation arose, the pre-trial investigation was reopened in 2016.
Both Aarnio and Vilhunen dismissed the subsequent charges, but were at odds with each other during the trial. Vilhunen confirmed that he was aware of the conspiracy and passed it on to Aarnio as a police spokesman. Aarnio, on the other hand, denied having received such information from William and said he had heard nothing but rumors about the conspiracy.
The Helsinki Court of Appeal ruled on Friday that Aarnio had been notified of the conspiracy in advance – first several months before the murder, even with the name of one of the contract killers. Vilhunen continued to inform him of the conspiracy, when he asked his subordinate to supervise a detached house in Herrala, near Lahti.
Vilhunen told Aarnio that the contract murder had been transferred from Swedish to Finnish criminals at least a week before it was committed.
However, according to the court, Aarnio was unaware of the imminent threat to the victim’s life, as there was no evidence that he knew where, when, or how the victim was to be murdered. Contrary to his claim, he was considered to be in possession of the key to the apartment where the murder took place, as he knew a woman named Sarah, the tenant of the apartment.
The Helsinki Court of Appeal concluded that Aarnio had no special obligation to prevent Ünsal’s murder. Such an obligation cannot be based on the law, his job, his official position or his position.
According to the Police Act, an individual police officer is also obliged to act in his or her spare time and without an order in situations where immediate action is necessary to prevent a serious crime.
The Helsinki Court of Appeal was also not convinced that the murder could have been prevented by warning the victim of the threat, as he had already been warned by the Swedish police. Aarnio thus had no information about the details of the conspiracy that the potential victim did not already know.
Matti TolvanenProfessor of Criminal and Procedural Law at the University of Eastern Finland, told me A new aspect of the judgment in YLE on Friday is that the court has weighed the victim’s actions and their significance from the point of view of criminal negligence.
“[The court] considered that if an adult, a qualified person, takes a voluntary risk, it has an impact on estimates of whether someone contributed to their death through negligence, he explained to the broadcaster. “Ünsal has probably been doomed to take the risk when he came to Finland. The Swedish police had warned him especially about traveling to Finland.
Aarnio continues to serve the 13-year prison sentence imposed on him for, among other things, aggravated drug offenses.
Aleksi Teivainen – HT
Source: The Nordic Page