Witnesses have said that the shooting lasted an hour before police arrived at the scene, although police said they were there 40 minutes after the gunfire started.
After Breivik’s capture, police brought him ashore in a small boat.
Suspect in Norway attacks admits involvement, denies responsibility
Two coordinated terror attacks in Norway have left at least 92 dead. Flags flew at half-staff and the Army patrolled the streets, in a city that just endured its worst peacetime attack in history. (July 23)
“He looked unaffected, quite cold, like it was a normal day,” said Anders Nohre Berg, 34, who lives nearby. “I think a lot of people are happy it’s just one crazy guy, not a terrorist group or al-Qaeda or something like that.”
Sigrid Skeie Tjensvoll, who had come out to see the bomb damage in Oslo, agreed. “If Islamic people do something bad, you think, ‘Oh, it’s Muslims,’ ” she said. “But if a white Protestant does something bad, you just think he’s mad. That’s something we need to think about.”
Like others, she was trying to grasp the randomness of terror. She works for the state broadcaster NRK, which is in a building close by the site of the explosion. At first she thought the noise was thunder, then maybe a gas explosion. Then she realized it was a bomb. “This whole area is where we go every day. Any of us could have — you know, I could have gone for a beer with my friends around here. That’s where I would go.”
Deeqa Omer was at home about 200 yards from the bomb site. “This is totally shocking for us,” she said. “Norway’s a tiny, tiny country. Everybody knows everybody. The town is petite.”
She arrived in Norway from Somalia when she was 4 and today runs a nursery school. She’s Muslim but said she can’t say she feels relieved now that suspicion has shifted. “The thing is, so many young people died. And something has changed. I don’t know if I can see Oslo with the same eyes as before, really feeling safe. I’m afraid maybe this is something new.”
The bomb blast blew out the windows at the Vaart Land newspaper office. Brita Skogly Kraglund said the whole staff ran out into the street. She was unhurt but badly shaken. She left behind her glasses, phone and keys. It was 3:30 p.m., and deadline was approaching. They couldn’t go back into the building, so a core group of writers and editors went to the home of the newspaper’s IT chief, who had plenty of computers scattered across his house. They got the paper out.
“I thought immediately about Oklahoma City,” said her husband of 32 years, Ivar Dyb Kraglund, a senior researcher at Norway’s Resistance Museum, as first Muslims and then a lone right-winger were blamed. “But then this massacre” on the island followed the bombing, he said, making the incident even more horrifying.
“It’s worse than anything the Germans did in this country” during World War II, he said, though hundreds of Norwegian Jews were deported and later killed elsewhere.
The right-wing extremist movement in Norway is not a hothouse for violent rhetoric or action. “There isn’t this big milieu” of extremists talking to one another, said Anders Ravik Jupskas, an expert on far-right extremism at the University of Oslo.
The right-wing Progress Party, the second-largest political bloc in the country, favors a severely restricted immigration policy, but it has disavowed violence, and some of its most extremist members were pushed out several years ago.
Breivik was a youth member of the party from 1999 until 2004, Norwegian media reported, but he appears to have split from the group because he felt it was not sufficiently anti-immigrant, according to Internet postings attributed to him on a far-right Web site, Document.no .
Based on Breivik’s apparent online writings, Jupskas said, “His whole ideology is really infused by this idea that the Norwegian political establishment has betrayed the country, that they’ve turned this into a multicultural experiment and that someone has to put a stop to it.”
A Facebook profile that appeared to be Breivik’s was deleted early Saturday. On it, Breivik described himself as Christian and conservative and listed an interest in hunting and in “founding and developing organizations.” His literary affinities, he said, include John Stuart Mill, George Orwell and Franz Kafka. He liked to watch “Dexter” — an American television show about a serial killer.
“There’s a fine line between genius and crazy,” said Roy Erik Brynjulfsen, 25, who was at work providing technical support for a satellite television company just a few blocks from the blast site and who came out Saturday to see what he could see. “Obviously, this was a crazy man. He did it on his own, thinking he was a genius.”
Staff writer Alice Fordham in Washington contributed to this report.
- Spam
- Obscene
- Duplicate
The Post Most: WorldMost-viewed stories, videos and galleries int he past two hours
Our Correspondents on Twitter
Loading...
Comments