OSLO, Norway (AP) — Norwegian far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik shocked a courtroom in Norway on Friday with grisly descriptions of his massacre on an island youth camp.
Survivors of the July 22 rampage were hugging and sobbing, trying to comfort each other during Breivik’s testimony in Oslo’s district court. That testimony was broadcast to 17 other courtrooms where the relatives of other victims were gathered.
He left out no detail from his rampage, explaining how he shot panicked youth at point-blank range. Sixty-nine people, mostly teenagers at an annual summer camp, were killed on Utoya island.
“Some of them are completely paralyzed. They cannot run. They stand totally still. This is something they never show on TV,” Breivik said. “It was very strange.”
Breivik has admitted to setting off a bomb in Oslo, killing eight people, before opening fire to the governing Labor Party’s annual youth camp on Utoya island. But he has pleaded not guilty to criminal charges, saying his victims had betrayed Norway by embracing immigration.
Looking tense but focused, Breivik spoke calmly about the shooting rampage, from the moment he took a small ferry to Utoya, an island in a lake outside Oslo.
He was disguised as a policeman, carrying a rifle and a handgun. He also brought drinking water because he knew he would get a dry throat from the stress.
Breivik’s first two victims were Monica Boesei, one of the organizers of the camp, and off-duty police officer Trond Berntsen, who was on Utoya as a security guard.
“My whole body tried to revolt when I took the weapon in my hand. There were 100 voices in may head saying ’Don’t do it, don’t do it,’ ” Breivik said.
But he did.
He said he pointed his gun at Berntsen’s head and pulled the trigger. He shot Boesei as she tried run away. Then as they lay on the ground, he shot them both twice in the head.
Breivik said he couldn’t remember large chunks of the time he spent on the island before surrendering to police commandos. Still, he recalled some of the shootings in great detail, including inside a cafe building were he mowed down young his victims as they pleaded for their lives.
The testimony was physically revolting. Inside the court, a man who lost his son on the island closed his eyes hard, squeezing them shut. Another man to his left put a comforting hand to his shoulder. A woman to his right clutched on to him, resting her forehead against his arm.
Earlier, Breivik took to the Internet to learn how to carry out a bombing-and-shooting rampage, studying attacks by al Qaeda, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
On Friday, the fifth day of his trial, the confessed mass killer told a Norwegian court he paid close attention in particular to the World Trade Center bombing in New York and McVeigh’s 1995 attack on an Oklahoma City government building, which killed 168 people and injured over 600.
Breivik also said he had read more than 600 bomb-making guides.
He called the Islamist group “the most successful revolutionary movement in the world” and said it should serve as an inspiration to far-right militants, even though their goals are different.
“I have studied each one of their actions, what they have done wrong, what they have done right,” Breivik said of al Qaeda. “We want to create a European version of al Qaeda.”
His lack of remorse and matter-of-fact description of weapons and tactics during his testimony have deeply disturbed families of the victims, most of whom were teenagers.
The 33-year-old Norwegian said he was deliberately using “technical” language as a way to keep his composure.
“These are gruesome acts, barbaric acts,” he said. “If I had tried to use a more normal language I don’t think I would have been able to talk about it at all.”
Christin Bjelland, a spokeswoman for a massacre support group, said she was “quite upset” by Breivik’s testimony.
“I’m going back to my hometown tonight and I live by the sea, so I have arranged with my husband, he’s going to drive me out to the sea, and I’m going to take a walk there and I’m going to scream my head off,” Bjelland told the Associated Press.
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