NETHERLANDS LINKS:ANDERS BEHRING Breivik played the online role-playing war game World of Warcraftwith a Dutch enthusiast – who won the Norwegian gunman's approval because he'd voted for far-right leader Geert Wilders.
In his 1,500-page manifesto, Breivik describes how he used Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraftand Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2to prepare for last Friday's twin attacks which left a total of 76 people dead.
"I just bought Modern Warfare 2,the game," he wrote in the document, entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. "It is probably the best military simulator out there and it's one of the hottest games this year. I see MW2 more as part of my training-simulation than anything else."
It emerged yesterday that one of Breivik’s regular opponents in the multi-player computer game – known as WoW – was Dutch video games enthusiast, Jeroen Rink, who had no idea of Breivik’s real political views or of the double massacre he was allegedly planning.
“I was deeply shocked when I found out that Anders was the person behind what had happened in Oslo”, he said yesterday.
“We talked about politics on occasion and I thought he was pretty radical,” explained Rink, who comes from the Netherlands province of North Holland.
“When he heard I had voted for the PVV (The Freedom Party) and so Geert Wilders, he sent me a link on line. I only opened it during the weekend and looked at it properly.
“I was shocked. It contained a lot of pages filled with propaganda, including videos and photographs. And also Anders, with guns.”
As it emerged that Breivik claimed behind closed doors in court in Oslo yesterday that he had “two more cells” working with him, Holland’s National Co-ordinator for Counter-terrorism, Erik Akerboom, said that while the secret service and the police were following developments closely, the terrorism threat level was not being raised.
The threat level in the Netherlands is currently at “limited”, the second-lowest of four levels – which indicates that the likelihood of a terrorist attack is slight, though by no means non-existent.
As a precaution, the Norwegian embassy in The Hague, as well as Norwegian consulates are under increased surveillance.
However, there are concerns that in his manifesto, Breivik was scathing about the two political parties in the minority coalition government, the Liberals (VVD) and the Christian Democrats, as well as the opposition Labour Party – all three of whom he described as “traitors” for allegedly being soft on immigration.
He wrote in the document: “I just wonder whether the Dutch are already a broken nation, mentally speaking. Their political elites have chosen formal surrender and will enforce sharia and ban everyone disagreeing with this as ‘extremists’.
“Native Dutchmen will either have to fight back, or leave their country behind and watch it die from a distance ...”