What he was about to describe, he cautioned, would be "horrendous".
But no warning could truly prepare Oslo criminal court for the experience of listening to
Anders Behring Breivik detail in a calm, blank way how he gunned down terrified teenagers in the second of two attacks he carried out on 22 July last year.
The 33-year-old spent two hours on Friday afternoon giving a bullet-by-bullet account of
what he refers to as his "operation" on the island of Utøya., where the youth wing of
Norway's Labour party was holding its annual summer camp. He shot and killed 67 people on the island that day; another fell off a cliff and died trying to escape. One more, a 17-year-old called Håkon Ødegaard, drowned while attempting to swim away.
Leaning back in his chair, twizzling a pen in his right hand, Breivik – flushed, but never losing control — told of how some of the children he killed were so paralysed with fear that he had time to reload his rifle before shooting them. He'd never seen such a thing, he said – not even on TV.
He recalled teenagers "playing dead" whom he slowly approached before shooting them at close range.
Relatives of those he had killed hugged each other. Some who had dodged his bullets stared straight ahead. There were tears in the eyes of some of the most experienced journalists in the courtroom. Lawyers bit their lips as they listened to Breivik, in a clear, measured voice, remember how he decided halfway through the massacre to "look for places where I would naturally try to hide."
On the west side of the island, he said he came across a group "hiding, pressing themselves against the cliff face." With nowhere to run, he was able to shoot them too. Another gang had clustered near an escarpment beneath Kjærlighetsstien, Lovers' Path. Spotting them, he murdered five, claiming his youngest victim, Sharidyn Meegan Ngahiwi Svebakk-Bøhn, who had just celebrated her 14th birthday.
Breivik remembered campers "screaming and begging for their lives."
One boy saw him coming and shouted "Please, mate". Breivik shot him regardless: "I shot everyone there." He repeatedly recalled taking what he called "follow-up" shots to ensure that those on the ground were really dead. It was just one of a string of military terminology he used on Friday to describe the massacre. He also referred to using a building on the island as a "forward operational base". It was to there that, in one of the most tragic twists, he had persuaded his first victim to help him carry a bag containing extra rounds of ammunition.
Trond Berntsen, 51, one of the island's security officials, had met Breivik off the ferry. Utøya's head of security, Monica Elisabeth Bøsei, had been told by Breivik that he needed to her help to sail to the island because he was a police officer who had come to reassure campers in the wake of the Oslo bombing he had carried out barely an hour earlier. He was dressed in police uniform, and Bøsei believed him. As Breivik put it: "She bought it." Within five minutes of Breivik setting foot on the island, both the security officals were lying dead between the pier and the so-called information building.
Breivik has never expressed remorse for the attacks, saying those he killed on Utøya were not "innocent, non-political children" but "young people who worked to actively uphold multicultural values", and, as such, "legitimate targets". His plan was to kill all 564 people on the island, he had said on Thursday, though he thought most would drown trying to flee his bullets: "The main goal was to use the water as a mass destruction method," he said. "It's hard to swim if you have death anxiety."
But he said on Friday that he had deliberately spared those who looked the youngest, recalling at one point how he encountered "a small boy ... crying hard". Breivik said: "I don't know if he is paralysed, he is just standing there, crying. And he looks very small, very vulnerable, I thought he can't possibly be 16 years old, so I said 'fine, just relax, things will work out.'" He turned around and carried on his killing spree.
Hearing a helicopter overhead, Breivik said he considered killing himself. "I thought, 'do I really want to survive this? I will be the most hated person in Norway and every day for the rest of my life will be a nightmare.' And then I looked over and saw my Glock [pistol], and I thought, 'all right should I shoot myself in the head?'"
But what stopped him pulling the trigger was the thought of the 1,801-page manifesto he had spent five years compiling in an attempt to make Norway wake up to what he sees as the "systematic deconstruction of the Norwegian and European culture" from multiculturalism. "I thought about the compendium, thought, 'you are obliged to fight and if you are unable to fulfil a mission you should let yourself be arrested and fight for your cause through the judicial procedure or prison.'"
Breivik was eventually arrested by Delta, the Norwegian special forces, after leaving 69 people dead and injuring a further 33 on the island. He immediately confessed to the murders, as well as to planting the bomb in Oslo's government district which had killed eight earlier in the day.
As such, the only real question for the court to decide is whether Breivik is "criminally insane". The self-styled "militant nationalist" insists he knew exactly what he was doing when he planned and carried out the attacks. On Friday he again attacked the two psychiatrists who produced the first evaluation of his mental health last year, coming to the conclusion that he was not of sound mind and should be locked up in a secure hospital rather than a prison. A second report came to the opposite conclusion.
"This case is very simple," said Breivik. "I'm not a psychiatric case and I am sane ... it's very important to see the difference between political extremism and lunacy in a clinical sense."
Questioned by his own lawyers how he was able to carry out the attacks, he described a "meditation" technique he had developed which mixed "Christian prayer" and Japanese "Bushido warrior codex" practised by Samurai fighters.
He insisted he was a "nice person" who was capable of empathising with those whose lives he had ruined, but that he had chosen not to as a self-preservation technique. "In many ways it is a protection mechanism," he said. "First of all, if you are going to be capable of executing such a bloody and horrendous operation you need to work on your mind, your psyche for years. We have seen from military traditions you cannot send an unprepared person into war."
Asked how he was able to talk about the atrocities in such an impassive manner, Breivik said he had learnt to rely on "technical, de-emotionalised language" — "if I was going to use normalised language it would not have been possible" to go through police interviews and "this trial", he added. "People say, 'he must be a monster, he cannot be from this planet, he must have no emotions and empathy left', but this has to do with preparing and training."
Questioned as to his client's sanity after the end of the court session, Geir Lippestad, Breivik's defence lawyer, said: "It's not just a coincidence that very skilled experts have arrived at different conclusions."
On his last day of testimony, Anders Behring Breivik described his shooting spree and told victims’ families that he lost “everything” as a result of the massacre.
