Fabrizio Bensch/ReutersAnders Behring Breivik - The New York TimesNews about Anders Behring Breivik. Commentary and archival information about Anders Behring Breivik from The New York Times.Anders Behring BreivikUpdated: July 24, 2011Anders Behring Breivik is the 32-year-old Norwegian man charged with killing at least 93 people in an Oslo bombing and a shooting rampage at a summer camp for young political activists on July 22, 2011.
Mr. Breivik was seized by the police at a Labor party camp on the island of Utoya, not far from the capital. They said he killed 86 people there, most of them young people attending a political camp run by the dominant Labor party.
The authorities described him as a right-wing 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.
On July 24, the police and Mr. Breivik's lawyer said that he had admitted to "the facts'' in the rampage. But a police official said that he "is not admitting criminal guilt” and his claim to have acted alone contrasted with “some of the witness statements,” Reuters reported.
Mr. Breivik's lawyer said that his client called the killings "atrocious,'' but "necessary.
“He wanted a change in society and, from his perspective, he needed to force through a revolution. He wished to attack society and the structure of society,” the lawyer said.
Breivik's WritingsIn a Facebook page and a Twitter account set up under his name days before the rampage, suggesting 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.”
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.”
Horrors of the AttacksThe horror of the twin strikes on the government building and a political summer camp on Utoya Island, a remarkably meticulous attack on Norway’s current and future political elite, came into focus in interviews with witnesses, who painted a picture of 90 minutes of hell that left at least 85 people dead, some as young as 16.
As soon as the shooting started, they 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, the gunman calmly and methodically shot at those who were swimming.
The police also said that unexploded munitions were still in some downtown Oslo buildings, and they had not ruled out the possibility that Mr. Breivik had accomplices.
The police are working on the assumption that Mr. Breivik, having drawn security services to central Oslo when he exploded a car bomb outside government offices, then traveled to Utoya Island dressed as a police officer. Once there, he said he had come to check on the security of the young political campers, gathered them together and proceeded, coldly, to shoot them and then hunt down those who fled.
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.
Utoya is a wooded retreat accessible only by boat about 19 miles northwest of Oslo. The police said that difficulty reaching the island 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.
BackgroundNorwegian 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.
Mr. Breivik had been a member of the Progress Party but quit in 2006, disappointed by its move toward moderation; his Internet postings also indicate contempt for the Conservative Party. He said it had given up a serious battle against multiculturalism, which he said was diluting the nation’s character. He also criticized the government for spending too little of Norway’s oil wealth at home.
Mr. Breivik had registered a farm-related business in Rena, in eastern Norway, which authorities said allowed him to order a large quantity of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, an ingredient that can be used to make explosives. Authorities were investigating whether the chemical may have been used in the bombing.
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