Anders Behring Breivik
Pool photo by Hakon Mosvold Larsen
Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian, killed 77 people in a bombing and a shooting rampage in Oslo and on Utoya Island, a summer camp for young political activists, on July 22, 2011.
Mr. Breivik, a right-wing extremist, admitted to the slayings in a court hearing shortly afterward, but denied criminal guilt, portraying the victims as “traitors” for embracing multiculturalism and Muslim immigration policies.
On March 7, 2012, Mr. Breivik, 33, was indicted on terror and murder charges for the killings. The central issue in the trial will be whether he is insane.
Two court-ordered psychiatric reports have contradictory conclusions. The first report, released in November 2011, determined that Mr. Breivik was a psychotic paranoid schizophrenic before, during and after the attacks. The second, in April 2012, said he was sane, albeit with a narcissistic personality disorder.
His trial, which is expected to last 10 weeks, opened on April 16. By turns defiant, impassive and tearful, Mr. Breivik proclaimed that he acted in self-defense, bore no criminal guilt and rejected the authority of the court. He had previously denied criminal responsibility on the ground that he was protecting Norway against Islamic immigration.
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. There has been much questioning of why the police took more than an hour to reach the island after the gunman launched the attack.
Depicted as a Loner Obsessed With Computer Games
On the second day of the trial, Mr. Breivik described the deaths as “the most spectacular sophisticated political act in Europe since the Second World War” and said he would do it over again. He rejected an assessment by one psychiatrist that he suffered from a narcissistic personality disorder. “July 22 wasn’t about me. July 22 was a suicide attack. I wasn’t expecting to survive that day,” he said.
On the third and fourth days of the trial, prosecutors pressed Mr. Breivik on his extremist affiliations. He insisted that he belonged to a “cell” within an organization with members across Europe. He sweated and equivocated through skeptical prosecutors’ questioning about his trips to Liberia and London in 2002, during which he says he met a Serbian war criminal and was a founder of the organization, the Knights Templar. Prosecutors say the group does not exist.
As prosecutors chipped away at the question of what happened on his travels, Mr. Breivik seemed to sense that they were seeking to portray him as a fantasist and a loner. But he refused to explain the trip, saying he did not want to expose other network members.
Prosecutors continued to depict Mr. Breivik as a friendless loser, rather than the founder of a shadowy terrorism group called Knights Templar. Prosecutors said Mr. Breivik spent an entire year playing computer war games in his mother’s home. Mr. Breivik acknowledged an investment setback in December 2006, after which he moved into his mother’s Oslo house and spent the next year playing the game “World of Warcraft” for 16 hours a day.
Mr. Breivik also said he spent four months through February 2010 playing another game, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare,” for six hours a day. That game, he said, helped him hone his shooting skills because he was able to practice with the aid of its holographic sight. During questioning about the holographic sight, a prosecutor questioned why Mr. Breivik was smiling. “I know where you are trying to lead me,” Mr. Breivik said. “It is very obvious. You are trying to humiliate me.”
Fearful of Multiculturalism
To the consternation of many Norwegians, Mr. Breivik appears to have achieved at least one of his stated aims — a highly visible platform, with the eyes of the world upon him.
The terror charges carry a maximum penalty of 21 years in prison, but sentences can be prolonged indefinitely for inmates deemed to pose a danger to Norwegian society. Similar rules apply in psychiatric care.
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.
The authorities have described Mr. Breivik as a fundamentalist Christian, a gun-loving Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threat of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration to the cultural and patriotic values of his country.
Mr. Breivik’s lawyer, Geir Lippestad, has described him as a “very cold” person who lived in his own world, buttressed by drugs and the belief that he was a warrior doomed to die for a cause that others did not comprehend. He said that his client called the killings “atrocious,’' but “necessary.”
A Well-Organized Attack
One thing is certain: the killings pointed to a meticulous and well-organized attack on Norway’s current and future political elite. Police said that after Mr. Breivik exploded a car bomb outside government offices in downtown Oslo, he then traveled to Utoya Island, a wooded retreat sponsored by Norway’s Liberal Party, located about 19 miles northwest of Oslo. He came to the camp, which is accessible only by boat, dressed as a police officer. Once there, he said he had come to check on the security of the young political campers. He then gathered them together and proceeded, coldly, to shoot them and then hunt down those who fled.
As soon as the shooting started, witnesses said, people panicked, running in all directions, tumbling down the island’s rocky hill in an attempt to reach the sea. Even after many made it into the water, Mr. Breivik calmly and methodically shot at those who were swimming.
He was equipped, the police said, with an automatic rifle and a handgun; when the police finally got to the island, about 40 minutes after the shooting started, Mr. Breivik surrendered when they called out to him, dropping his weapons. The police said that they had difficulty reaching the island, which delayed their response.
Norway’s prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, had been scheduled to speak to the campers; a former leader of Labor’s youth wing, he had attended the camp every summer since 1974.
Breivik’s Writings
A Facebook page and a Twitter account set up under his name days before the rampage suggest a conscious effort to construct a public persona and leave a legacy for others. Mr. Breivik cited philosophers like Machiavelli, Kant and John Stuart Mill. Although there did not appear to be calls for violence in his Internet postings, he hinted at his will to act in his lone Twitter post, paraphrasing Mill: “One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.”
In a 1,500-page manifesto, posted on the Web hours before the attacks, Mr. Breivik recorded a day-by-day diary of months of planning for the attacks, and claimed to be part of a small group that intended to “seize political and military control of Western European countries and implement a cultural conservative political agenda.”
He predicted a conflagration that would kill or injure more than a million people, adding, “The time for dialogue is over. We gave peace a chance. The time for armed resistance has come.”
Mr. Breivik’s manifesto spells out plans for using anthrax as part of his war to defend Europe against what he called the rising threat of Muslim domination. But experts in biological weapons said the manifesto showed no evidence that he had actually obtained the lethal germ or could wield it as a weapon. They said the document — at least on the subject of germ attacks — evoked the air of an armchair theorist rather than someone poised to commit mass slaughter.
The manifesto was signed Andrew Berwick, an Anglicized version of his name. A former American government official briefed on the case said investigators believed the manifesto was Mr. Breivik’s work.
The manifesto, entitled “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” equates liberalism and multiculturalism with “cultural Marxism,” which the document says is destroying European Christian civilization.
The document also describes a secret meeting in London in April 2002 to reconstitute the Knights Templar, a Crusader military order. It says the meeting was attended by nine representatives of eight European countries, evidently including Mr. Breivik, with an additional three members unable to attend, including a “European-American.”
Background
Norwegian analysts said that the country’s right-wing groups were very small, having shrunk considerably since the 1990s, and had been quiet. Even the Progress Party, which began as an anti-tax protest and has been stridently anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim in the past, has moved more to the center, to the point that it is seen as a potential coalition partner for the Conservative Party in the 2013 general election.
When Mr. Breivik was not plotting mass murder and fine-tuning the bomb he detonated here, he was busy playing video games and blogging, listening to Euro pop and watching episodes of “True Blood” — except on Sunday nights, when he usually dined with his mother.
It was a parallel life he maintained meticulously in recent years. Former classmates and colleagues described him as unremarkable and easy to forget, qualities, perhaps inborn, that he cultivated — consciously, he would say — to mask his dedication to what he called his “martyrdom operation.”
For years, Mr. Breivik participated in debates in Internet forums on the dangers of Islam and immigration. It is not clear at what point he decided that violence was the solution to the ills he believed were tearing European civilization asunder. Before the attacks that he has admitted mounting on government buildings and a children’s summer camp, he was careful never to telegraph his intentions.
It was about a decade ago that Mr. Breivik started to change. Once a schoolboy who was fond of hip-hop and had a Muslim best friend, in his 20s he began to view the immigrants who flowed freely into Norway and elsewhere in Europe as enemies, and those who sought to accommodate them as traitors, worthy only of execution.
Early in life, Mr. Breivik, far from being a radical, appeared to be on a track to join Norway’s political establishment. He grew up in Skoyen, a middle-class district of western Oslo. His father, a civil servant, and mother, a nurse, divorced when he was 1. Beyond that, his childhood seems to have been uneventful; Mr. Breivik said in his manifesto that it was happy.
He attended the elite high school where the country’s current king, Harald V, and his son once studied. Former classmates remembered him as quiet but intelligent, with a small rebellious streak: he was a prolific graffiti artist.
Toward the end of high school, he joined the youth wing of the Progress Party, drawn to its anti-immigrant platform and market capitalist bent. But those who knew him from those days said that he failed to leave much of a mark.
He began to struggle with life, those who knew him said. He became estranged from his father, who moved to France. Then his sister, Elisabeth, on whom he seemed to rely in his father’s absence, moved to the United States and married an American.
It was a time when, according to his manifesto, his political views began to transmute. He began to perceive what he said was the hostility of Muslim youth. He latched on to reports of attacks against ethnic Norwegian men and rapes of ethnic Norwegian women by immigrant gangs.
Dagbladet, a national newspaper, quoted an unnamed fellow student from Mr. Breivik’s high school days as saying that Mr. Breivik started showing an interest in far-right and neo-Nazi movements around the age of 18, in the late 1990s, and that he was rumored to have worked as a doorman or bouncer at neo-Nazi events. He would later become critical of neo-Nazi groups.
Mr. Breivik wrote that the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 was a tipping point for him, describing the operation meant to halt a genocide as a betrayal of a fellow Christian people for the sake of Muslims.
He spent the next decade slowly working out his plan, though few people, it seems, had any inkling of it.
To earn money for the attacks, he wrote that he had started a company that earned him millions. Neighbors cast doubt on this claim, however, saying that they thought he had inherited some money from relatives.
As he went about gathering six tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and turning aspirin powder into pure acetylsalicylic acid for his bomb, he led an active life online, railing against Muslims and Marxists in debate forums.
The police say he rented a farm in eastern Norway, not far from the capital, and holed up there for several months to prepare his bomb.
When not surfing conservative blogs, Mr. Breivik was fighting virtual demons, ogres and other fantastical creatures in online role-playing games. He was a regular in talk forums for players of “World of Warcraft,” using a busty female as his avatar and the handle Conservatism.
Prosecutors continued to depict Mr. Breivik as a friendless loser, rather than the founder of a shadowy terrorism group called Knights Templar. Prosecutors said Mr. Breivik spent an entire year playing computer war games in his mother’s home. Mr. Breivik acknowledged an investment setback in December 2006, after which he moved into his mother’s Oslo house and spent the next year playing the game “World of Warcraft” for 16 hours a day.
Mr. Breivik also said he spent four months through February 2010 playing another game, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare,” for six hours a day. That game, he said, helped him hone his shooting skills because he was able to practice with the aid of its holographic sight. During questioning about the holographic sight, a prosecutor questioned why Mr. Breivik was smiling. “I know where you are trying to lead me,” Mr. Breivik said. “It is very obvious. You are trying to humiliate me.”
Fearful of Multiculturalism
To the consternation of many Norwegians, Mr. Breivik appears to have achieved at least one of his stated aims — a highly visible platform, with the eyes of the world upon him.
The terror charges carry a maximum penalty of 21 years in prison, but sentences can be prolonged indefinitely for inmates deemed to pose a danger to Norwegian society. Similar rules apply in psychiatric care.
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.
The authorities have described Mr. Breivik as a fundamentalist Christian, a gun-loving Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threat of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration to the cultural and patriotic values of his country.
Mr. Breivik’s lawyer, Geir Lippestad, has described him as a “very cold” person who lived in his own world, buttressed by drugs and the belief that he was a warrior doomed to die for a cause that others did not comprehend. He said that his client called the killings “atrocious,’' but “necessary.”
A Well-Organized Attack
One thing is certain: the killings pointed to a meticulous and well-organized attack on Norway’s current and future political elite. Police said that after Mr. Breivik exploded a car bomb outside government offices in downtown Oslo, he then traveled to Utoya Island, a wooded retreat sponsored by Norway’s Liberal Party, located about 19 miles northwest of Oslo. He came to the camp, which is accessible only by boat, dressed as a police officer. Once there, he said he had come to check on the security of the young political campers. He then gathered them together and proceeded, coldly, to shoot them and then hunt down those who fled.
As soon as the shooting started, witnesses said, people panicked, running in all directions, tumbling down the island’s rocky hill in an attempt to reach the sea. Even after many made it into the water, Mr. Breivik calmly and methodically shot at those who were swimming.
He was equipped, the police said, with an automatic rifle and a handgun; when the police finally got to the island, about 40 minutes after the shooting started, Mr. Breivik surrendered when they called out to him, dropping his weapons. The police said that they had difficulty reaching the island, which delayed their response.
Norway’s prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, had been scheduled to speak to the campers; a former leader of Labor’s youth wing, he had attended the camp every summer since 1974.
Breivik’s Writings
A Facebook page and a Twitter account set up under his name days before the rampage suggest a conscious effort to construct a public persona and leave a legacy for others. Mr. Breivik cited philosophers like Machiavelli, Kant and John Stuart Mill. Although there did not appear to be calls for violence in his Internet postings, he hinted at his will to act in his lone Twitter post, paraphrasing Mill: “One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.”
In a 1,500-page manifesto, posted on the Web hours before the attacks, Mr. Breivik recorded a day-by-day diary of months of planning for the attacks, and claimed to be part of a small group that intended to “seize political and military control of Western European countries and implement a cultural conservative political agenda.”
He predicted a conflagration that would kill or injure more than a million people, adding, “The time for dialogue is over. We gave peace a chance. The time for armed resistance has come.”
Mr. Breivik’s manifesto spells out plans for using anthrax as part of his war to defend Europe against what he called the rising threat of Muslim domination. But experts in biological weapons said the manifesto showed no evidence that he had actually obtained the lethal germ or could wield it as a weapon. They said the document — at least on the subject of germ attacks — evoked the air of an armchair theorist rather than someone poised to commit mass slaughter.
The manifesto was signed Andrew Berwick, an Anglicized version of his name. A former American government official briefed on the case said investigators believed the manifesto was Mr. Breivik’s work.
The manifesto, entitled “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” equates liberalism and multiculturalism with “cultural Marxism,” which the document says is destroying European Christian civilization.
The document also describes a secret meeting in London in April 2002 to reconstitute the Knights Templar, a Crusader military order. It says the meeting was attended by nine representatives of eight European countries, evidently including Mr. Breivik, with an additional three members unable to attend, including a “European-American.”
Background
Norwegian analysts said that the country’s right-wing groups were very small, having shrunk considerably since the 1990s, and had been quiet. Even the Progress Party, which began as an anti-tax protest and has been stridently anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim in the past, has moved more to the center, to the point that it is seen as a potential coalition partner for the Conservative Party in the 2013 general election.
When Mr. Breivik was not plotting mass murder and fine-tuning the bomb he detonated here, he was busy playing video games and blogging, listening to Euro pop and watching episodes of “True Blood” — except on Sunday nights, when he usually dined with his mother.
It was a parallel life he maintained meticulously in recent years. Former classmates and colleagues described him as unremarkable and easy to forget, qualities, perhaps inborn, that he cultivated — consciously, he would say — to mask his dedication to what he called his “martyrdom operation.”
For years, Mr. Breivik participated in debates in Internet forums on the dangers of Islam and immigration. It is not clear at what point he decided that violence was the solution to the ills he believed were tearing European civilization asunder. Before the attacks that he has admitted mounting on government buildings and a children’s summer camp, he was careful never to telegraph his intentions.
It was about a decade ago that Mr. Breivik started to change. Once a schoolboy who was fond of hip-hop and had a Muslim best friend, in his 20s he began to view the immigrants who flowed freely into Norway and elsewhere in Europe as enemies, and those who sought to accommodate them as traitors, worthy only of execution.
Early in life, Mr. Breivik, far from being a radical, appeared to be on a track to join Norway’s political establishment. He grew up in Skoyen, a middle-class district of western Oslo. His father, a civil servant, and mother, a nurse, divorced when he was 1. Beyond that, his childhood seems to have been uneventful; Mr. Breivik said in his manifesto that it was happy.
He attended the elite high school where the country’s current king, Harald V, and his son once studied. Former classmates remembered him as quiet but intelligent, with a small rebellious streak: he was a prolific graffiti artist.
Toward the end of high school, he joined the youth wing of the Progress Party, drawn to its anti-immigrant platform and market capitalist bent. But those who knew him from those days said that he failed to leave much of a mark.
He began to struggle with life, those who knew him said. He became estranged from his father, who moved to France. Then his sister, Elisabeth, on whom he seemed to rely in his father’s absence, moved to the United States and married an American.
It was a time when, according to his manifesto, his political views began to transmute. He began to perceive what he said was the hostility of Muslim youth. He latched on to reports of attacks against ethnic Norwegian men and rapes of ethnic Norwegian women by immigrant gangs.
Dagbladet, a national newspaper, quoted an unnamed fellow student from Mr. Breivik’s high school days as saying that Mr. Breivik started showing an interest in far-right and neo-Nazi movements around the age of 18, in the late 1990s, and that he was rumored to have worked as a doorman or bouncer at neo-Nazi events. He would later become critical of neo-Nazi groups.
Mr. Breivik wrote that the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 was a tipping point for him, describing the operation meant to halt a genocide as a betrayal of a fellow Christian people for the sake of Muslims.
He spent the next decade slowly working out his plan, though few people, it seems, had any inkling of it.
To earn money for the attacks, he wrote that he had started a company that earned him millions. Neighbors cast doubt on this claim, however, saying that they thought he had inherited some money from relatives.
As he went about gathering six tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and turning aspirin powder into pure acetylsalicylic acid for his bomb, he led an active life online, railing against Muslims and Marxists in debate forums.
The police say he rented a farm in eastern Norway, not far from the capital, and holed up there for several months to prepare his bomb.
When not surfing conservative blogs, Mr. Breivik was fighting virtual demons, ogres and other fantastical creatures in online role-playing games. He was a regular in talk forums for players of “World of Warcraft,” using a busty female as his avatar and the handle Conservatism.
ARTICLES ABOUT ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK
Newest First | Oldest First
Norway: Anders Breivik Studied Al Qaeda
Anders Breivik, who has confessed to killing 77 people last year, said that before carrying out his bombing-and-shooting rampage, he studied attacks by Al Qaeda and other terrorists.
April 20, 2012
Breivik Says He Wishes Norway Death Toll Had Been Higher
Anders Behring Breivik told prosecutors in court that his massacre last summer was justified, and that he had planned to behead a former prime minister.
April 19, 2012
Prosecutors Press Anders Behring Breivik on Extremist Affiliations
Anders Behring Breivik was questioned about trips to Liberia and London during which he said he met a Serbian war criminal and founded his anti-Islamic militant group.
April 18, 2012British Ultranationalist Warns of Shariah's 'Creeping' Influence, and Twitter Laughs
A Twitter thread was soon filled with mockery of its premise of a stealth campaign by Muslims to replace Western values with a version of Islamic law.
April 17, 2012MORE ON ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK AND: Muslims and Islam, Shariah (Islamic Law), Europe, Breivik, Anders Behring
On Witness Stand in Norway, Breivik Says He’d Kill Again
Demanding his acquittal, Anders Behring Breivik took the stand for the first time, describing his killing of 77 people last year as a “sophisticated political act.”
April 17, 2012MORE ON ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK AND: MURDERS AND ATTEMPTED MURDERS, NORWAY
Video of Anders Behring Breivik in Court
Television coverage of the trial of Anders Behring Breivik, the gunman who has admitted that he killed 77 people during twin attacks in Norway last year, showed him smiling, crying and raising his fist in a salute.
April 16, 2012MORE ON ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK AND: Murders and Attempted Murders, Terrorism, Norway, Oslo (Norway), Utoya (Norway), Breivik, Anders Behring
Raised-Fist Salute Has Varied Meanings
Anders Behring Breivik, the anti-Muslim militant who admitted to killing 77 people in a bombing and shooting spree last year, began his first day of trial with a disturbing, rod-straight salute of the arm, his fist closed tightly.
April 16, 2012MORE ON ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK AND: Fringe Groups and Movements, Politics and Government, Norway, Breivik, Anders Behring
Breivik Claims Self-Defense in Norway Killings
Anders Behring Breivik, accused of killing 77 people at a camp last summer, was defiant and impassive as his trial opened in the July 2011 killings.
April 16, 2012MORE ON ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK AND: MURDERS AND ATTEMPTED MURDERS, FRINGE GROUPS AND MOVEMENTS, MUSLIMS AND ISLAM, NORWAY
Anders Breivik
The Norwegian anti-Islamic militant will face a maximum sentence of 21 years. That's nothing, by American standards.
April 16, 2012MORE ON ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK AND: Prisons and Prisoners, Sentences (Criminal), Breivik, Anders Behring
Norway: Mass Killer Found to Be Sane
A new psychiatric evaluation of Anders Behring Breivik, who confessed to killing 77 people in Norway last year, concluded Tuesday that he was not psychotic when he carried out the attacks.
April 11, 2012MORE ON ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK AND: MURDERS AND ATTEMPTED MURDERS, MENTAL HEALTH AND DISORDERS, UTOYA (NORWAY), NORWAY
Norway: Man Is Charged in Rampage
Anders Behring Breivik was indicted Wednesday on terrorism and murder charges related to the killings of 77 people last July, but prosecutors said he would probably not go to prison.
March 8, 2012Norway: Killer of 77 Was Insane During Rampage, Prosecution Says
The confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik belongs in psychiatric care instead of prison, prosecutors in Norway said Tuesday.
November 30, 2011MORE ON ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK AND: PRISONS AND PRISONERS, MURDERS AND ATTEMPTED MURDERS, MENTAL HEALTH AND DISORDERS, NORWAY
Norway: Accused Oslo Gunman Appears in Court
Anders Behring Breivik, an avowed anti-immigrant extremist who has admitted to killing 77 people in a rampage in Norway last summer, appeared at his first public court hearing on Monday.
November 15, 2011
King Harald of Norway Proves Mettle With Response to July 22 Deaths
July 22, when 77 people were killed by a homegrown terrorist in Norway, was King Harald V’s test. He is considered to have passed it.
October 16, 2011Poland: 19 Are Arrested in Sweep Tied to Inquiry on Norway Attacks
A Polish security agency said Wednesday that 19 people had been arrested on suspicion of producing and possessing explosives as part of a wider investigation into people with links to Anders Behring Breivik.
October 13, 2011MORE ON ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK AND: BOMBS AND EXPLOSIVES, NORWAY
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