Norway Terror Attack Included Assassination Attempt On Former Prime Minister

Anders Breivik is more than a little chatty when it comes to spilling details about his evil plot to engage in mass murder, using the bombing of government offices in Oslo as a diversion from his main plan to murder dozens of kids attending a youth camp organized by the Norwegian Labour Party. More than 90 people were killed in the dual attacks, and Breivik intended that one of the targets was the former Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland. On top of the mass murder, he wanted to throw assassination of public officials in for good measure in hopes of sparking a Christian war.

"Anders Behring Breivik had plans to come to Utoeya (island) while Gro Harlem Brundtland was visiting on Friday, but claims under interrogation that he was delayed," Aftenposten reported on Monday, citing unnamed sources.

The newspaper said the 32-year-old right-wing fanatic wanted to "hit Gro".

Brundtland, a Harvard-educated physician, has been a champion of social democratic policy approaches worldwide, and served as president of the World Health Organisation from 1998 to 2003.The report said Breivik made the remarks under questioning by police in advance of a court hearing on Monday.

He invokes Christianity all while those who knew him didn't find him particularly political or religious. They seem to suggest that inadequacies over finding a girlfriend spurred him to engage in to this descent to hell, using a melange of Unabomer and other assorted pseudo-political rhetoric to somehow justify his intentions to murder as many people as possible.

The Norwegian justice system will have a hard time trying to come to grips with this mass murder - the maximum sentence that can be handed down under these circumstances is 21 years; they cannot sentence Breivik to have consecutive sentences. Norway will have to decide whether that particular law needs to be adjusted going forward, but that too will be cold comfort to his victims' families.

Norwegian police have responded to accusations that they were delayed in properly responding to the events unfolding on the island.

The first report of the July 22 shooting was received at 5:27 p.m. by police in the Nordre Buskerud district in which Utoeya is located and the gunman was apprehended at 6:27 p.m. by the Emergency Response Team from Oslo, two minutes after they arrived on the island, spokesman Henning Holtaas said by phone. Officers in Oslo were dealing with the aftermath of a related bomb attack in the capital as the island shooting began.

“I completely understand that for those caught in the line of fire as well as for their relatives the response time felt long,” Chief of Police Sissel Hammer of Nordre Buskerud Police District said in a statement yesterday. “However, I ask for understanding of the fact that the deployment of armed police personnel will always require time. Personnel need time to be equipped and armed as well as transported to the scene.”

The twin attacks on Utoeya and in Oslo killed as many as 93 people, with most of the victims shot on the island, about 40 kilometers (28 miles) from the capital by car. The police will have to answer questions about the speed of their response to events on Utoeya, Dagbladet, an Oslo-based newspaper, reported.

The Emergency Response Team had already been assembled in Oslo following the bomb attack two hours earlier, which claimed the lives of seven people, and travelled to the island by car because the only helicopter available to the police was not equipped for the task, Holtaas said. Police in Norway do not routinely carry firearms.

“Considering the equipment that they needed, it was easier as they sat in their cars, just to drive directly out there,” Holtaas said. Norway’s only police helicopter is used for monitoring and surveillance and “doesn’t have the capacity in that helicopter to bring personnel.”

Breivik’s rampage on the island lasted 90 minutes, during which he is alleged to have called on the youths to come to him for police protection, before shooting them point-blank. He was wearing a fake police uniform.

UPDATE:

None of what he did happened in a vacuum. He had influences, and trying to claim that this was done because he was inadequate to get the attentions of women ignores what he actually wrote - and what he's actually saying.

He believed it to the point of murdering nearly 100 people.
He intended to murder many more - including assassinating a former PM.

This isn't just about inadequacies around women. This is about buying into a worldview that sees the "other" as the enemy - and the current scapegoat is Muslims - all Muslims. In another day and age, it would be the Jews. Or those who aren't blonde and blue eyed.

It's all the same kind of recycled hatred, and we ignore this hate at our own peril.

UPDATE:
While the ultimate death toll still isn't known, the identities of some of the victims are being released. Among those killed is a stepbrother to Norway Crown Princess Mette-Marit, Trond Berntsen. He was gunned down by Breivik trying to protect others as a security guard. The investigation has also gone to France, where law enforcement was searching the home of Breivik's father:

Meanwhile, French police are searching the suspect's father's home Monday. About a dozen officers surrounded the house in Couranel in southern France, entering and leaving at irregular intervals. The house is cordoned off, and reporters do not have access.

The regional gendarme service confirmed the house was that of Anders Behring Breivik's father but would not comment on the search operation. News reports have said Breivik's father, Jens Breivik, has not been in touch with his son in many years.