Breivik planned to decapitate former PM

Confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik testified yesterday that he had planned to capture and decapitate former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland during his shooting massacre on Utoya island.

Breivik said his plan was to film the beheading and post the video on the internet. Brundtland had already left the Labour Party’s youth camp on Utoya when Breivik arrived on July 22, after setting off a bomb in Oslo that killed eight people. Sixty-nine people, mostly teenagers, were killed on Utoya, where nearly 600 members of the Labour Party’s youth wing had gathered for their annual summer retreat.

“The plan was to behead Gro Harlem Brundtland while it was being filmed,” Breivik told the court.

The far-right fanatic said he was inspired by al-Qaida’s use of decapitation but noted that “beheading is a traditional European death penalty.”

“It was meant to be used as a very powerful psychological weapon,” he said.

Breivik also testified that he had prepared for his attacks by cutting off contact with the outside world and devoting himself to two computer games — Modern Warfare and World of Warcraft, playing the second one for 16 hours a day.

Brundtland was prime minister for the Labour Party for 10 years. She later headed the World Health Organisation and was appointed as a UN climate change envoy in 2007.

“Gro Harlem Brundtland has no comment on the information provided by Breivik, nor the court case in general,” her adviser, Jon Moerland, told The Associated Press.

On the fourth day of his trial in Oslo, Breivik spoke at ease about Norway’s worst peacetime massacre, describing the victims as “traitors” and showing no sign of remorse.

“The goal was not to kill 69 people on Utoya. The goal was to kill them all.”

The 33-year-old Norwegian said his original plans were to set off three bombs in Oslo, including at the royal palace, but building just one fertiliser bomb turned out to be “much more difficult than I thought”.

“I settled on the palace in a setting where the royal family wouldn’t be hurt,” he said. “Most nationalists and cultural conservatives are supporters of the monarchy, including myself.

“When I reached a situation where it was impossible to make more than one bomb, it resulted in a strategy of one bomb and one shooting-based action.”

His preferred targets for the shooting massacre were an annual conference of Norwegian journalists or the Labour Party’s annual meeting. But he couldn’t get prepared in time, so he decided on striking against the summer retreat of the Labour Party’s youth wing.

Breivik, who styles himself a modern-day crusader, has confessed to the attacks but rejects criminal guilt, saying he was acting to protect Norway and Europe by targeting left-wing political forces he claims have betrayed the country by opening it up to immigration.

The trial is expected to last 10 weeks.