Norway on edge amid Oslo station security alert
Norway’s domestic intelligence chief said she believed Anders Behring Breivik had acted alone in killing 76 people in a bomb attack and shooting spree, and contested an assertion by the killer’s lawyer that his client was probably insane.
Oslo’s central station was evacuated after a suspicious suitcase was found on a bus, and all train and bus services were halted. Police cars, fire trucks and ambulances ringed the station, but police said later the suitcase was harmless.
“Nothing was found that was of interest to the police,” Chief Superintendent Tore Barstad told reporters, adding that the suitcase search had no known link with last Friday’s attacks.
In another false alarm, police retracted a search alert for a man who identified with Breivik, saying in fact they wanted to detain a disturbed man with no link to the killer.
A cabinet minister made a symbolic return to her office in Oslo’s government district where Breivik detonated the powerful home-made bomb that killed eight people. The bomb blew a hole in Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s office. For now, he will work from the defence ministry in another area of Oslo and cabinet meetings will be held in a mediaeval fort near the waterfront. It is not clear whether the 17-storey prime ministry building will be rebuilt or torn down.
“I am glad to be back in my office . . . to be able to resume the more normal work functions,” Administration and Church Minister Rigmor Aaserud told reporters. Her office, in a government complex, was little damaged. In Stoltenberg’s building, which took the brunt of the car bomb blast, curtains flapped from a host of broken windows.
Stoltenberg has won high ratings from voters for his handling of the crisis, with about 80% of Norwegians reckoning he has performed “extremely well,” according to a survey published in the daily Verdens Gang.
The prime minister, who knew some of the victims, has caught the national mood, urging his compatriots in a voice often cracking with emotion to unite around democratic values.
Norwegians, unused to violence in a quiet country of 4.8 million, must struggle with how to improve security without jeopardising the freedom and openness of their society.
On Tuesday night police destroyed an explosives cache found at a farm rented by Breivik, some 160km north of Oslo. They believe he made his bomb using fertiliser which he had bought under cover of being a farmer. After the bombing, Breivik, 32, drove to an island hosting a youth camp of the ruling Labour Party and coolly shot dead 68 people, mostly youngsters, before surrendering to armed police.
Breivik’s lawyer, Geir Lippestad, said his client was probably a madman, but it was too early to say if the loner and computer game enthusiast would plead insanity at his trial.
Breivik has confessed to his actions, but denied guilt, saying he was part of a network with two cells in Norway and more abroad that was fighting to save European “Christendom” from the spread of Islam and the danger of multi-culturalism.
But police believe Breivik probably acted alone in staging his assaults, which have united Norwegians in revulsion.
“So far we don’t have any evidence of the cells, neither in Norway nor in Britain,” Janne Kristiansen, head of the PST security police, told the BBC. Breivik’s online manifesto referred to a secret meeting in London in 2002 to found a ‘Knights Templar’ group to drive Islam out of Europe.
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