Lawyer Suggests Suspect in Norway Attacks Is Insane
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: July 26, 2011
OSLO — The Oslo police on Tuesday evening began a gradual release of the names of the dead in the Norway massacre, as the lawyer representing the man who admitted responsibility said he thought his client was insane and would spend the rest of his life incarcerated.
Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters
Geir Lippestad, lawyer for Anders Behring Breivik, the man accused of a killing spree and bomb attack in Norway, in Oslo on Tuesday.
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The lawyer, Geir Lippestad, declined to say whether his client, Anders Behring Breivik, 32, would plead insanity as a defense when his case finally reached the trial stage. But he described Mr. Breivik as “very cold,” distanced from the real world and believing that he was a warrior destined to die for the eventual salvation of European Christian values.
“This whole case has indicated that he is insane,” Mr. Lippestad said. “I can’t describe him because he’s not like anyone.”
Mr. Breivik has admitted to fashioning and detonating a large bomb in Oslo that killed eight people, then shooting and killing 68 more, mainly youths, at a summer camp run by the Labor Party, which leads the coalition government, on the nearby island of Utoya. The attacks on Friday amounted to one of the worst massacres in postwar Europe, and the date, July 22, has already been seared into the Norwegian consciousness.
Psychiatrists have yet to evaluate Mr. Breivik, but the police said they were holding him in isolation under a suicide watch. Mr. Lippestad said that Mr. Breivik asked him how many people he had killed but that he did not tell him. The lawyer also said Mr. Breivik was high on drugs as he shot the people on the island, one bullet at a time.
There were extraordinary outpourings of solidarity for the victims and mass mourning all over Norway, with more than 200,000 people pouring into the streets on Monday evening. The enormous blanket of flowers and candles in front of the Oslo Cathedral is still growing.
On Tuesday evening, after visiting wounded young victims in the hospital, Jonas Gahr Store, Norway’s foreign minister and a senior member of the Labor Party, went to a large Oslo mosque of the World Islamic Mission to express solidarity with the country’s Muslim population.
In an interview, Mr. Store said Mr. Breivik’s victims on the island were “Christians, Muslims, atheists, they were everything.”
He acknowledged the debate in Norway, and elsewhere, about the changes caused by cross-border migration, which Mr. Breivik so violently opposed. Mr. Store said the changes had shifted Norway from “a monoethnic country to one of greater diversity.”
“We’re not for or against,” he said. “It’s a reality, and to escape diversity you have to go to North Korea.”
The vast majority of Norwegians, he said, “are decent people, and profoundly reject this kind of violence.”
While many in Norway do not want Mr. Breivik’s actions to affect politics here, Mr. Store said that was inevitable, too. Politics, once the mourning period passed, was the way to deal with the issues raised by the killings, he said.
“What kind of statements and actions can lead to this?” he said. “How can we have an inclusiveness that brings all views inside the camp of democracy while drawing lines in the sand about incitement and hatred?”
The “real strength of Norway is not to deny these questions but confront them,” Mr. Store said. And he noted that the young victims of Mr. Breivik’s violence had “really believed in politics, and if we put politics into the second rank it would be strange.”
By Tuesday evening, the police had released the first four names of those who were confirmed dead — three from the bombing and one from the island. They ranged in age from 23 to 61.
The father of the youngest, Gunnar Linaker, told The Associated Press that his son was “a calm, big teddy bear with lots of humor and lots of love.” The father said he had been on the phone with his son when the shooting started. “He said to me, ‘Dad, Dad, someone is shooting,’ and then he hung up.”
Questions still persisted about the response time of the police and Mr. Breivik’s claim that he had collaborators. Mr. Lippestad, the lawyer, said the police had told him that Mr. Breivik was cooperating but had refused to answer questions about his assertion that he had accomplices in at least two other “cells” in Norway and “several abroad.”
Paal-Fredrik Hjort Kraby, a police prosecutor, seemed to cast doubt on Mr. Breivik’s claim. He said in an interview with Bloomberg News that he believed that Mr. Breivik’s remarks about the Norway cells might have actually been a reference to two other individuals, and that it was “unlikely that they would have the determination and the funding and the time — he has been planning this for a long time.”
The police have said that there is no other evidence yet to show that Mr. Breivik had accomplices, and that so far, spent ammunition on the island appears to have come only from his two guns.
The high number of the dead might also lead to a different set of charges against Mr. Breivik. Carol Sandbye, a spokeswoman for the Oslo police, said Tuesday that prosecutors would consider charging Mr. Breivik with crimes against humanity, which carries a maximum penalty of 30 years, compared with 21 years for the current charges of terrorism.
The crimes against humanity law took effect in 2008 to conform with Norway’s international legal commitments, said Jon Thorvald Johnsen, a law professor at the University of Oslo. Norway abandoned mandatory life sentences some years ago, Mr. Johnsen said, and now detainees can generally expect to be released after serving two-thirds of their sentences. But the law allows for the indefinite prolongation of sentences — in blocks of five years at a time, each renewed by a judge — for convicts deemed dangerous to public security, Mr. Johnsen said.
Mr. Lippestad said Mr. Breivik expected to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Defending themselves from criticism about their slow response time, the police said they had only one helicopter, which was only suitable for surveillance, and reacted as quickly as they could.
One senior police officer, Johan Fredriksen, seemingly moved, said that criticism was fine but that “we are human beings underneath our uniforms."
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