Killing in one of the world’s safest countries
There may be no safer country than this island of fjords, Bjork and arctic calm.
This is Iceland, where police are often unarmed and people walk safely at all hours of the night — just as Birna Brjansdottir was doing 10 days ago, when she disappeared.
And then her Doc Martens turned up near a dock, and the 20-year-old’s blood was found in a car. And then, on Monday, her body was found on a beach.
Now, there is weeping in the capital and candles in the snow, as a country that has gone full years without murders asks who, why, how?
“How can such a thing happen in our peaceful Iceland?” a columnist wrote in the Iceland Monitor, which has been following the case beat by beat, like seemingly everyone else on this island of some 330,000 people. “If you are not familiar with the family, you know someone who is,” Soley Bjork Gudmundsdottir, wrote. “This whole affair feels personal.”
It has felt that way for nearly two weeks, since security cameras along a downtown street in Reykjavik captured Brjansdottir’s last known footsteps. Brjansdottir zagged down a pavement in the predawn hours of January 15 — she was just past a breakup, her parents said, and leaving a club after an indie band festival.
A kebab in her hand, swaying, she nearly careened into two people, who barely took notice. She continued down an empty block, auburn hair shimmying on her shoulders, past a storefront’s flashing red light. Then out of the frame. Then nothing.
The very worst things are rare in Iceland, which sees fewer than two murders a year on average, and sometimes none. The Institute for Economics and Peace, an Australiabased think-tank, ranks it as the world’s most peaceful country.
Police traced her cellphone to a town 20 minutes down the coast from Reykjavik, where someone had turned it off, according to the Monitor.
Iceland’s elite police force seized the Polar Nanoq, a ship that had set sail from the same port where Brjansdottir’s shoes were found, on the same day she went missing. Two sailors on the trawler had rented a car on the night of her disappearance, police said. She had walked right past the car after leaving the club.
The two sailors from Greenland were taken in for questioning. Police found blood in the sailors’ rented car.
Already, those safe northern waters seem colder.