Gunman in Norway Claims Self-Defense as Trial Begins
Heiko Junge/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Anders Behring Breivik saluted as he entered the courtroom in Oslo on Monday morning.
By MARK LEWIS and ALAN COWELL
Published: April 16, 2012
OSLO — By turns defiant, impassive and, just once, tearful, a self-described anti-Islamic militant who admitted carrying out Norway’s worst peacetime atrocity last year, killing 77 people including scores of young people at a summer camp on a tranquil, wooded island, went on trial here on Monday proclaiming that he had acted in self-defense, bore no criminal guilt and rejected the authority of the court.
In remarkable evidence played to a packed and shocked courtroom, recordings of cellphone calls made by the gunman to the police suggested that he had tried twice to give himself up and had simply gone on killing in the absence of officers to accept his surrender. In the period after the first call to his final shot being fired, prosecutors said, 41 people died.
The gunman, Anders Behring Breivik, 33, has admitted on several occasions that he carried out the rampage on July 22, in which 69 people were shot and killed on Utoya Island, near Oslo, where the youth wing of the governing Labor Party was holding a summer camp. Hours earlier, a car bombing in central Oslo killed eight people.
As the grisly evidence unfolded, and some of the bereaved families and survivors in the courtroom sobbed inconsolably, Mr. Breivik remained mostly impassive, and at one point seemed to discreetly stifle a yawn. Only as the court viewed a video that Mr. Breivik had made before the attacks to publicize his cause, did he break down in tears, dabbing at his face.
Asked by a judge on Monday whether he wished to plead guilty, Mr. Breivik said, “I acknowledge the acts, but I don’t plead guilty as I claim I was doing it in self-defense.” He had previously denied criminal responsibility on the grounds that he was protecting Norway from Islamic immigration.
Mr. Breivik showed no emotion on Monday as the prosecutor, Inga Bejer Engh, solemnly and painstakingly intoned the names of the dead. “I do not recognize the Norwegian courts,” Mr. Breivik said at another point in the hearing. “You have received your mandate from political parties which support multiculturalism. I do not acknowledge the authority of the court.”
Hundreds of reporters and video crews have flooded into Oslo to cover Mr. Breivik’s hearings, which are evoking both drama and outrage as Norway relives the horror last summer that shattered its self-image as a well-ordered place of relative tranquillity and tolerance.
The bloody intrusion of urban terrorism into ordinary lives was rekindled in dozens of images of wreckage and explosions recorded by security cameras at the time of the Oslo bombing — before the killings on Utoya — and shown to the court on Monday, prompting survivors, bereaved families and journalists to gasp in shock, some of them covering their mouths with their hands.
Then, in perhaps the most wrenching moment of the first day’s hearing, the court heard a two-minute recording of the voice of an unidentified girl hiding in a toilet on the island. “He’s coming. He’s coming. Please...”
Then there was only the sound of shots being fired.
In e time it took the police to hear that brief call on July 22, prosecutors said, seven more people had died. Since then there has been much questioning of why the police took more than an hour to reach the island after the gunman launched into the attack. When officers did finally arrive, Mr. Breivik surrendered.
In the second call offering to surrender, Mr. Breivik could be heard describing himself as a commander of an organization called the Knights Templar.
“My name is Anders Behring Breivik. I’m a commander of the Norwegian Resistance Movement. Could you give me the head of Delta?” he said, apparently referring to an elite police unit. “I’m on Utoya. I’m a person who wishes to surrender,” he said, claiming to have successfully completed an “operation.”
“Since it has been completed, it is time to give myself up to Delta,” he said and then rang off. At least 11 more people were killed before he did, in fact, turn himself in, prosecutors said.
The prosecution also showed a photograph of the island with a moving electronic red line showing the progression of the killings. As the line made its way around the island, Svein Holden, a prosecutor, paused it to read out the name of the victim who died at that point.
As he entered the courtroom dressed in a dark suit on Monday, Mr. Breivik offered a display of defiance, delivering a clenched-fist salute with his right arm thrust rigidly out from his body, but shook hands with court officers.
In a manifesto posted online shortly before the attacks last year, Mr. Breivik described the gesture as the salute of the Knights Templar organization, which he claimed to have founded a decade ago. Prosecutors said in court on Monday that the group did not exist, apparently contradicting Mr. Breivik’s initial assertions that he acted as part of a broader conspiracy rather than as a so-called lone wolf.
Sporting a neatly trimmed, thin beard tracing his chin and jaw line, he seemed to alternate between nervous perusal of notes — some reports said the papers he was reading listed the names of his victims — and smirks toward photographers.
Asked to identify himself, he gave his name and denied a court official’s statement that he was unemployed and lived in prison. “That is not correct,” he said. “I am a writer and I work from prison.”
As the case resumed after a break for lunch, Mr. Breivik refused to join others in rising to stand when the judges re-entered the courtroom.
Mr. Breivik wants to read out a 30-minute statement that will be “the most important piece of evidence presented to the court on whether he will be found to be sane or not” when he gives evidence for the first time in his full trial on Tuesday, his lawyer, Geir Lippestad, said on Monday as the case adjourned after its first day.
“We understand the bereaved don’t want this court to be turned into a pulpit, we understand it would be hard for the families,” Mr. Lippestad said, “but he has a right as a defendant in Norwegian law to give a statement, and a human right as well.” The five judges did not immediately rule on the request.
His trial is set to last 10 weeks, with many Norwegian analysts fearing that he will use the occasion as an opportunity to broadcast his cause in a land that, like much of the Nordic region, prides itself on a social model that discourages radicalism. The central issue facing the court is to determine his mental health.
If Mr. Breivik is deemed to have been sane when he carried out the killings, the presiding judges can sentence him to up to 21 years in prison, with a provision to keep him behind bars for longer if he is still considered dangerous. If found insane, Mr. Breivik can be kept in forced psychiatric care for as long as his illness persists.
Two court-ordered psychiatric reports have reached contradictory conclusions. The first report, last November, determined that Mr. Breivik was a psychotic paranoid schizophrenic before, during and after the attacks. The second, on April 10, said he was sane, albeit with a narcissistic personality disorder.
In a letter to the Norwegian news media on April 4, Mr. Breivik said the two psychiatrists responsible for the initial report were ideologically predisposed to pass an insanity judgment.
“Our political views are completely incompatible,” he said, restating a belief “that multiculturalism is an anti-Norwegian, hate ideology designed to deconstruct Norwegian ethnicity, Norwegian culture and traditions, and Norwegian Christianity.
“Where I believe that multiculturalists facilitate the gradual Islamic colonization of our country, they consider that Islam is a great enrichment for Norway and Europe.”
Mr. Lippestad, Mr. Breivik’s lawyer, has proposed calling witnesses from extreme ends of the political spectrum to demonstrate that Mr. Breivik’s fears of Muslim colonization were not fantasies.
Among them is Mullah Krekar, an Iraqi-born Islamist cleric who moved to Norway in 1991 and was sentenced to five years in prison in March for making death threats against Norwegian officials and three Kurds.
Ron Atle, the leader of a far-right group, and Carl Hagen, the former leader of the mainstream anti-immigration Progress Party, will also be called, prompting claims from prominent Norwegian lawyers that Mr. Lippestad was planning to turn the trial into “a circus.”
But the appetite among Norwegians for more coverage of the killings seems limited.
Saturation newspaper coverage since the attacks and three pretrial courtroom appearances have left many people in the country wanting to see less of Mr. Breivik.
Dagbladet, the country’s second-largest daily, has even introduced a Breivik-free version of its Web site for the duration of the trial.
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Gunman in Norway Claims Self-Defense as Trial Begins
By MARK LEWIS and ALAN COWELL
OSLO — By turns defiant, impassive and, just once, tearful, a self-described anti-Islamic militant who admitted carrying out Norway’s worst peacetime atrocity last year, killing 77 people including scores of young people at a summer camp on a tranquil, wooded island, went on trial here on Monday proclaiming that he acted in self-defense, bore no criminal guilt and rejected the authority of the court.
In remarkable evidence played to a packed and shocked courtroom, recordings of cellphone calls made by the gunman to the police suggested that he tried twice to give himself up and simply went on killing in the absence of officers to accept his surrender. In the period after the first call to his final shot being fired, prosecutors said, 41 people died.
Anders Behring Breivik, 33, has admitted on several occasions that he carried out the rampage on July 22, in which 69 people were shot and killed on Utoya Island, near Oslo, where the youth wing of the governing Labor Party was holding a summer camp. Hours earlier, a car bombing in central Oslo killed eight people.
As the grisly evidence unfolded, and some of the bereaved families and survivors in the courtroom sobbed inconsolably, Mr. Breivik remained mostly impassive, and at one point seemed to a reporter watching him to stifle a yawn. Only as the court viewed a video that Mr. Breivik had made before the attacks to publicize his cause, did he break down in tears, dabbing at his face.
Asked by a judge on Monday whether he wished to plead guilty, Mr. Breivik said, “I acknowledge the acts, but I don’t plead guilty as I claim I was doing it in self-defense.” He had previously denied criminal responsibility on the ground that he was protecting Norway against Islamic immigration.
Mr. Breivik showed no emotion on Monday as the prosecutor Inga Bejer Engh solemnly and painstakingly intoned the names of the dead. “I do not recognize the Norwegian courts,” Mr. Breivik said at another point in the hearing. “You have received your mandate from political parties which support multiculturalism. I do not acknowledge the authority of the court.”
Hundreds of reporters and video crews have flooded into Oslo to cover Mr. Breivik’s hearings, which are evoking both drama and outrage as Norway relives the horror last summer that shattered its self-image as a well-ordered place of relative tranquillity and tolerance.
The bloody intrusion of urban terrorism into ordinary lives was rekindled in dozens of images of wreckage and explosions recorded by security cameras at the time of the Oslo bombing — before the killings on Utoya — and shown to the court on Monday, prompting survivors, bereaved families and journalists to gasp in shock, some of them covering their mouths with their hands.
Then, in perhaps the most wrenching moment of the first day’s hearing, the court heard a two-minute recording of the voice of an unidentified girl hiding in a toilet on the island. “He’s coming. He’s coming. Please...”
Then there was only the sound of shots being fired.
In e time it took the police to hear that brief call on July 22, prosecutors said, seven more people had died. Since then there has been much questioning of why the police took more than an hour to reach the island after the gunman launched into the attack. When officers did finally arrive, Mr. Breivik surrendered.
In the second call offering to surrender, Mr. Breivik could be heard describing himself as a commander of an organization called the Knights Templar.
“My name is Anders Behring Breivik. I’m a commander of the Norwegian Resistance Movement. Could you give me the head of Delta?” he said, apparently referring to an elite police unit. “I’m on Utoya. I’m a person who wishes to surrender,” he said, claiming to have successfully completed an “operation.”
“Since it has been completed, it is time to give myself up to Delta,” he said and then rang off. At least 11 more people were killed before he did, in fact, turn himself in, prosecutors said.
The prosecution also showed a photograph of the island with a moving an electronic red line showing the progression of the killing. As the line made its way around the island, Svein Holden, a prosecutor, paused it to read out the name of the victim who died at that point.
As he entered the courtroom dressed in a dark suit on Monday, Mr. Breivik offered a display of defiance, delivering a clenched-fist salute with his right arm thrust rigidly out from his body, but shook hands with court officers.
In a manifesto posted online shortly before the attacks last year, Mr. Breivik described the gesture as the salute of the Knights Templar organization, which he claimed to have founded a decade ago. Prosecutors said in court on Monday that the group did not exist, apparently contradicting Mr. Breivik’s initial assertions that he acted as part of a broader conspiracy rather than as a so-called lone wolf.
Sporting a neatly trimmed, thin beard tracing his chin and jaw line, he seemed to alternate between nervous perusal of notes — some reports said the papers he was reading listed the names of his victims — and smirks toward photographers.
Asked to identify himself, he gave his name and denied a court official’s statement that he was unemployed and lived in prison. “That is not correct,” he said. “I am a writer and I work from prison.”
As the case resumed after a break for lunch, Mr. Breivik refused to join others in rising to stand when the judges re-entered the courtroom.
His trial is set to last 10 weeks, with many Norwegian analysts fearing that he will use the occasion as an opportunity to broadcast his cause in a land that, like much of the Nordic region, prides itself on a social model that discourages radicalism. The central issue facing the court is to determine his mental health.
If Mr. Breivik is deemed to have been sane when he carried out the killings, the five presiding judges can sentence him to up to 21 years in prison, with a provision to keep him behind bars for longer if he is still considered dangerous. If he is found to be insane, Mr. Breivik can be kept in forced psychiatric care for as long as his illness persists.
Two court-ordered psychiatric reports have reached contradictory conclusions. The first report, last November, determined that Mr. Breivik was a psychotic paranoid schizophrenic before, during and after the attacks. The second, on April 10, said he was sane, albeit with a narcissistic personality disorder.
In a letter to the Norwegian news media on April 4, Mr. Breivik said the two psychiatrists responsible for the initial report were ideologically predisposed to pass an insanity judgment.
“Our political views are completely incompatible,” he said, restating a belief “that multiculturalism is an anti-Norwegian, hate ideology designed to deconstruct Norwegian ethnicity, Norwegian culture and traditions, and Norwegian Christianity.
“Where I believe that multiculturalists facilitate the gradual Islamic colonization of our country, they consider that Islam is a great enrichment for Norway and Europe.”
Mr. Breivik’s lawyer Geir Lippestad has proposed calling witnesses from extreme ends of the political spectrum to demonstrate that Mr. Breivik’s fears of Muslim colonization were not fantasies.
Among them is Mullah Krekar, an Iraqi-born Islamist cleric who moved to Norway in 1991 and was sentenced to five years in prison in March for making death threats against Norwegian officials and three Kurds.
Ron Atle, the leader of a far-right group, and Carl Hagen, the former leader of the mainstream anti-immigration Progress Party, will also be called, prompting claims from prominent Norwegian lawyers that Mr. Lippestad was planning to turn the trial into “a circus.”
But the appetite among Norwegians for more coverage of the killings seems limited.
Saturation newspaper coverage since the attacks and three pretrial courtroom appearances have left many people in the country wanting to see less of Mr. Breivik, not more.
Dagbladet, the country’s second-largest daily, has even introduced a Breivik-free version of its Web site for the duration of the trial.
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