It’s been nearly eight years since Anne-Elisabeth Hagen disappeared from her home in Lørenskog, northeast of Oslo. Now a man in his 50s has been charged in the case, but he claims he had nothing to do with it.
Hagen, married to wealthy Norwegian businessman Tom Hagen, is believed to have been kidnapped or murdered or both on the morning of October 31, 2018. When her husband came home from work later that day, he found a letter demanding a large ransom to be paid in crypto currency, and he quickly called police.
Their initial investigation went on in secret for more than two months, until police finally went public with it in January 2019 and confirmed that Anne-Elisabeth Hagen had disappeared from the couple’s home on Sloraveien in the Fjellhamar portion of Lørenskog 10 weeks earlier. The investigation continued and on April 28, 2020, not long after the pandemic had mostly shut down the country, Tom Hagen himself was charged with the murder of his wife, or as an accessory to her murder.
Several others were also charged in the case, but all denied any involvement. Tom Hagen was later released and charges against him were dropped in 2024, as were the others, and the case was branded as unsolved. Anne-Elisabeth Hagen has not been seen or heard from since.
Now police have a new suspect, a Norwegian citizen with a criminal record who has not been publicly identified. “In connection with the investigation of a suspect in the case, a decision was made to undertake a seizure,” Guro Holm Hansen of the police told Norwegian Broadasting (NRK) on Saturday. She said that makes those involved automatically charged in the case.
Hansen said the case continues to be investigated as a murder. The man charged denies have anything to do with the case and has refused to speak with police. His defense attorney, Victoria Holmen, told NRK that he was told last week that he had been the subject of an undercover investigation for several years and that he’d been charged in the disappearance of Anne-Elisabeth Hagen.
Holmen said she thinks the only reason the police have charged her client is because he was in Lørenskog on the day of Hagen’s disappearance. Newspaper VG has reported that police also continue to investigate other individuals or groups both in Norway and abroad. At least five police investigators continue to work on the case including experts on cyber crime.
NewsinEnglish.no/Nina Berglund
