‘I regret we weren’t able to arrest the suspect earlier’

The carnage caused by Anders Breivik began with a bomb in Oslo and culminated in a massacre of young people on the island of Utoya.

Eight people were killed when his device exploded at the high-rise building in Oslo at 3.26pm local time on July 22 last year.

It left a dust-clogged square covered in twisted metal and shattered glass.

Police described it as an “Oklahoma city-type” bombing, targeting a government building, perpetrated by a home-grown assailant and using the same mix of fertiliser and fuel that blew up a building in the US in 1995. The bomb was packed into a panel truck outside the building.

An agricultural supplier said Breivik bought six tonnes of fertiliser in the weeks before the explosion.

But as police battled to deal with the effects of the bomb, a much more deadly attack was about to begin 40km north-west of the capital.

Breivik, dressed as a policeman, drove to a lake outside the capital and took a ferry to the island of Utoya, where hundreds of young people were attending a summer camp organised by the youth wing of the Labour Party.

At around 4.50pm he opened fire, claiming another 69 lives. It is claimed that he beckoned to his young victims before shooting them one by one.

Survivors of the shooting spree described hiding and fleeing into the water to escape. Police arrived on the island an hour and a half after the gunman first opened fire, because they did not have quick access to a helicopter and could not find a boat to reach the scene just several hundred yards away.

When the armed officers did locate a boat they overloaded it, causing it to break down.

Breivik surrendered when officers finally reached him on Utoya at 6.35pm.

Oslo police director Oeystein Maeland said later: “I regret we weren’t able to arrest the suspect earlier than we did.”

He went on: “Could police have been faster? The answer is ‘yes’.

“If the boat hadn’t been over capacity, police would have been on Utoya faster.”

Mr Maeland added: “If it would have led to another and better result is nothing we know for sure, but we can’t rule it out. And it’s tough, like I’ve said before, to think that lives thereby would have been saved.”

Chilling accounts soon emerged of what happened at the camp.

A 15-year-old, Elise, said she heard gunshots but then saw a police officer and thought she was safe. Then the man started shooting people in front of her.

“I saw many dead people,” she said.

“He first shot people on the island. Afterwards he started shooting people in the water.”

Dana Berzingi, 21, said several victims “had pretended they were dead to survive”.

But after shooting them with one gun, he blasted them in the head with a shotgun, he added.