THE ISLAND of Utoeya is shockingly small. Covered with pine trees, it seems no larger than Ireland’s Eye: impossible to imagine how dozens of terrified teenagers could have hidden from a warped game of cat and mouse and lived to tell the tale.
On Friday afternoon, a man dressed as a policeman arrived on the island, in the middle of Tyrifjorden lake, claiming he was conducting a check after the bombings earlier that day in Oslo.
Anders Behring Breivik lured a group of unsuspecting teenagers around him and then turned his gun on them, reportedly shouting, “You all must die.”
As the first victims fell, others ran for their lives. The gunman followed calmly, cutting them down with automatic fire.
“He was so calm it seemed like he was shooting photos, not people,” said a teenage survivor named Edward.
Desperate youths trapped under the motionless bodies of their dead friends tried to hide there, but even that offered no certainty of survival.
“I lay down and pretended I was dead,” said Adrian Pracon. “He stood maybe two metres away from me. I could hear him breathing, the warmth of his machine gun. He kicked people to see if they were alive, then just shot them.”
A fuzzy aerial image released yesterday appears to show the gunman standing before a pile of bodies lying in shallow water, his gun aimed at a man in red standing in the sea whose arms were raised in surrender.
Dozens of teenagers who tried to swim to shore were forced to turn around and return to the waiting “policeman”.
He made several unhurried circuits of the island, cutting down long-time camp organisers and members of the Labour Youth League.
He looked into huts and behind rocks, shooting at close range anyone he could find. When police showed up after 90 minutes, he surrendered calmly.
By yesterday the idyllic setting, nestled between tree-lined hills, had become a media circus.
The road into the village of Sundvollen, opposite the island, was filled with television satellite trucks, the car park with Norwegian Red Cross vehicles.
“We’ve had youngsters happy one minute, happy to be alive, then crying with guilt that their friends are missing,” said Vivian Paulsen, head of the counselling effort of the Norwegian Red Cross.
On the calm waters of the bay near Sundvollen, not far from Oslo, police hunted for survivors – and bodies.
“I passed by the island heading home from work on Friday, apparently just as the shooting began but heard nothing,” said a 38-year-old local man named Thorbjorn, out walking his cocker spaniel.
“The problem with the island is that there is no way off except on the slow ferry, which the gunman used.”
Outside the red-roofed Sundvolden Hotel yesterday afternoon, agitated parents of missing teenagers stood around, waiting for news.
At the hotel gate, it was difficult to watch as the two Somali women met, then embraced in silence, shaking visibly.
In their colourful shawls, they seemed out of place among Norwegian families waiting for news of their loved ones.
But as many as 20 of the youths participating in the summer camp organised by the Labour Party’s youth wing were reportedly from first- and second-generation immigrant families, anxious to integrate into Norwegian society.
For the self-confessed gunman, these immigrants were an ethnic threat to the Norwegian – and European – way of life. For families of the victims, the blue-eyed blond gunman posed a far more deadly threat.
“This was an attack on Norwegian diversity,” said Noor Ahmad Noor, an Oslo imam, at the hotel.
He mingled with families alongside priests and ministers who were joined at lunchtime by Crown Prince Haakon and his wife, Princess Mette-Marit.
They spent hours with the families of missing children as they waited for news.
“The prince said he was glad to see us here, that all parents waiting for news of their children were united in shock,” said the imam as the royal couple left.
News continued to trickle in throughout the day. Four young people were still unaccounted for yesterday morning.
Then one body was found mid-morning on the island, another in the channel to the mainland, each the body of somebody’s son or daughter. The death toll had reached 86.