Breivik recounts island massacre

Norwegian far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik has shocked an Oslo courtroom with his grisly descriptions of a massacre carried out on an island youth camp.

Survivors of the July 22 killings hugged each other and sobbed during Breivik’s testimony in the city’s district court, broadcast to 17 other courtrooms where the relatives of the victims gathered.

Breivik went into detail as he explained how he shot panicked youngsters at point-blank range.

Sixty-nine people, mostly teenagers at an annual summer camp, were killed on Utoya island last summer.

Breivik admits carrying out 77 killings in total, but denies criminal charges, claiming his victims had betrayed Norway by embracing immigration.

The 33-year-old said: “Some of them are completely paralysed. They cannot run. They stand totally still. This is something they never show on TV ... It was very strange.”

Breivik has admitted to setting off a bomb in Oslo, killing eight people, before opening fire on the governing Labour Party's annual youth camp on Utoya island.

Looking tense but focused, Breivik spoke calmly about the shooting rampage, starting from the moment he took a small ferry to Utoya, an island in a lake outside Oslo.

He was disguised as a policeman, carrying a rifle and a handgun. He also brought drinking water because he knew he would get a dry throat from the stress.

Breivik’s first two victims were Monica Boesei, one of the organisers of the camp, and off-duty police officer Trond Berntsen, who was on Utoya as a security guard.

“My whole body tried to revolt when I took the weapon in my hand. There were 100 voices in may head saying ’Don’t do it, don’t do it,”’ Breivik said.

But he did – pointing his gun at Berntsen’s head and pulling the trigger. He shot Boesei as she tried run away. Then, as they lay on the ground, he shot them both twice in the head.

Breivik said he could not remember large chunks of the time he spent on the island before surrendering to police commandos. Still, he recalled some of the shootings in great detail, including inside a cafe building were he mowed down his young victims as they pleaded for their lives.

Beforehand, Breivik revealed how he took to the internet to learn how to carry out a bombing-and-shooting rampage, studying attacks by al-Qaida, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre.

Today, the fifth day of his trial, the confessed mass killer told the court he paid close attention in particular to the World Trade Centre bombing in New York and McVeigh’s 1995 attack on an Oklahoma City government building, which killed 168 people and injured more than 600.

Breivik also said he had read more than 600 bomb-making guides.

He called the Islamist group “the most successful revolutionary movement in the world” and said it should serve as an inspiration to far-right militants, even though their goals are different.

“I have studied each one of their actions, what they have done wrong, what they have done right,” Breivik said of al-Qaida. “We want to create a European version of al Qaida.”

His lack of remorse and matter-of-fact description of weapons and tactics during his testimony have deeply disturbed families of the victims, most of whom were teenagers.

The 33-year-old Norwegian said he was deliberately using “technical” language as a way to keep his composure.

“These are gruesome acts, barbaric acts,” he said. “If I had tried to use a more normal language I don’t think I would have been able to talk about it at all.”