Norway massacre suspect admits responsibility, defends actions
The suspect in Norway's twin attacks that killed at least 92 people admitted responsibility and said the carnage was long planned.
Anders Behring Breivik, 32, was arrested for allegedly shooting at a youth Labour Party meeting on an island and killing more people in a car bomb explosion which ripped through government buildings in Oslo. The death toll of the twin attacks amounts to at least 91 victims.
“He admitted responsibility,” Behring Breivik's lawyer Geir Lippestad told Norway's NRK television channel. While there was no official confirmation of the man's identity, he was widely named as Anders Behring Breivik by local media.
The suspect had believed his actions were "necessary".
“He explained that it was cruel but that he had to go through with these acts,” Lippestad said, adding that the attacks were “apparently planned over a long period of time”.
News media report that a rambling 1,500-page tract apparently written by Behring Breivik said he has been preparing the “martyrdom operation” since at least late 2009.
The internet document - part diary, part bomb-making manual and part political rant in which he details his Islamophobia - explains how he set up front mining and farming businesses to prepare the attacks for which he was arrested on Friday.
“The reasoning for this decision is to create a credible cover in case I am arrested in regards to the purchase and smuggling of explosives or components to explosives - fertiliser,” the tract says.
As harrowing testimony emerged from the summer camp where scores of youngsters were mown down, Norway was struggling to understand how a country famed as a beacon of peace could experience such bloodshed on its soil.
“Never since the Second World War has our country been hit by a crime on this scale,” Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told journalists as police searched for more bodies on the idyllic Utoeya island near Oslo.
“Many of those who have died were friends. I know their parents and it happened at a place where I spent a long time as a young person... It was a paradise of my youth that has now been turned into hell.”
The toll could rise further as the search continued for four or five people still missing from the island, aided by a mini-submarine and Red Cross scuba divers.
