Norwegian far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik has shocked an Oslo courtroom with his grisly descriptions of a massacre carried out on an island youth camp.
Survivors of the July 22nd killings hugged each other and sobbed during Breivik’s testimony in the city’s district court, broadcast to 17 other courtrooms where the relatives of the victims gathered.
Breivik went into detail as he explained how he shot panicked youngsters at point-blank range. Sixty-nine people, mostly teenagers at an annual summer camp, were killed on Utoeya island last summer.
Breivik (33) admits carrying out 77 killings in total but denies criminal charges, claiming his victims had betrayed Norway by embracing immigration.
He said: “Some of them are completely paralysed. They cannot run. They stand totally still. This is something they never show on TV . . . It was very strange.”
Breivik has admitted to setting off a bomb in Oslo, killing eight people, before opening fire on the governing Labour Party’s annual youth camp on Utoeya island.
Looking tense but focused, Breivik spoke calmly about the shooting rampage, starting from the moment he took a small ferry to Utoeya, an island in a lake outside Oslo.
He was disguised as a policeman, carrying a rifle and a handgun. He also brought drinking water because he knew he would get a dry throat from the stress.
A police officer checks the courtroom, where Anders Behring Breivik's trial is being held during a lunch break in Oslo. Photograph: Reuters/Heiko Junge/Scanpix
Breivik’s first two victims were Monica Boesei, one of the organisers of the camp, and off-duty police officer Trond Berntsen, who was on Utoeya as a security guard.
“My whole body tried to revolt when I took the weapon in my hand. There were 100 voices in may head saying ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it,‘” Breivik said.
But he did - pointing his gun at Mr Berntsen’s head and pulling the trigger. He shot Ms Boesei as she tried run away. Then, as they lay on the ground, he shot them both twice in the head.
Breivik said he could not remember large chunks of the time he spent on the island before surrendering to police commandos. Still, he recalled some of the shootings in great detail, including those inside a cafe building were he shot his young victims as they pleaded for their lives.
Today, the fifth day of his trial, the confessed mass killer told a Norwegian court he paid close attention in particular to the World Trade Center bombing in New York and McVeigh’s 1995 attack on an Oklahoma City government building, which killed 168 people and injured more than 600.
Breivik also said he had read more than 600 bomb-making guides.
He also called al-Qaeda “the most successful revolutionary movement in the world” and said it should serve as an inspiration to far-right militants, even though their goals are different.
“I have studied each one of their actions, what they have done wrong, what they have done right,” Breivik said of al-Qaeda. “We want to create a European version of al-Qaeda.”
His lack of remorse and matter-of-fact description of weapons and tactics during his testimony have deeply disturbed families of the victims, most of whom were teenagers.
The Norwegian said he was deliberately using “technical” language as a way to keep his composure. “These are gruesome acts, barbaric acts,” he said. “If I had tried to use a more normal language I don’t think I would have been able to talk about it at all.”
Christin Bjelland, a spokeswoman for a massacre support group, said she was “quite upset” by Breivik’s testimony.
“I’m going back to my hometown tonight and I live by the sea, so I have arranged with my husband, he’s going to drive me out to the sea, and I’m going to take a walk there and I’m going to scream my head off,” Ms Bjelland told reporters.
Breivik told the court he began consciously training to cut his range of feelings five years before the attacks, when he began to consider using violence to alert Europeans to what he considered the loss of their culture.
"One might say that I was quite normal until 2006 when I started training, when I commenced de-emotionalising," he told the court. "And many people will describe me as a nice person or a sympathetic, caring person to friends and anyone."
"I've had a dehumanisation strategy towards those I considered valid targets so I could come to the point of killing them," he said.
His legal team had said that today's testimony would be harrowing, focusing on the systematic slaughter.
The presiding judge told people attending the trial they were free to leave the courtroom at any time. The massacre on Utoeya in particular required mental preparation, he said.
Yesterday he explained he had played computers games up to 16 hours per day and used daily meditation to "hammer away" at emotions and embrace his own death. It is easy to press a button and detonate a bomb," he said. "It is very, very difficult to carry out something as barbaric as a firearms operation."
He had hoped, he said, to kill all 564 people on the island, with special attention to former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, a Labour party leader known as "mother of the country" who was to be the island that day.
"I had a bayonet on my rifle and I also had a knife," Breivik recalled. "The plan was to chop her head off while filming it and reading a text, then upload the film [onto the internet]," he said at yesterday's session.
He said he never got a chance to buy the advanced mobile telephone required for the film upload and in any case Ms Brundtland left Utoeya several hours before he arrived.
Under questioning about his feelings today, Breivik said he recognised the suffering he had caused but that he remained detached from it. His pre-attack mental training regimen was similar to that which Norwegian soldiers undergo to serve in Afghanistan, he said. "I would break down mentally if I removed the mental shields," he said.
Breivik's trial, set to last 10 weeks, turns on the question of his sanity and thus whether he can be jailed.
Before the trial, one court-appointed team of psychiatrists concluded Breivik was psychotic, while a second found him mentally capable.
He has said he should either be executed or acquitted, calling the prospect of a prison sentence "pathetic" and an insanity ruling "worse than death".
Defence attorney Geir Lippestad said Breivik's only goal at the trial is to prove himself sane - and that he feels he is succeeding.
"He thinks he has explained his views satisfactorily, the way he wishes, and he thinks that people understand what he is saying, at least the group he talks to," Mr Lippestad said.
Agencies