THE SHOOTINGS
Monica Bøsei, age forty-five, known as “Mother Norway” for her longtime management of the Labor Party’s Youth League summer camp, took a call from a man identifying himself as Martin Nilsen, from the Oslo Police Department, shortly before five P.M. He informed her that, due to the unrest since the bombing of the government building downtown, she was to immediately send the ferry to the mainland’s shore to pick him up. The sole purpose of this unplanned trip, the voice on the phone explained, was to see to it that he, Nilsen, an officer trained in dealing with the apprehension of suspects fleeing from the downtown attack scene, would be able to ensure a degree of safety once she got him to the island.
Bøsei must have felt her apprehension lessen. She, along with others on the island, had been feverishly discussing the attack. In fact, for the last hour, the city-center bombing had been the focus of conversation at the Labor Party’s summer youth camp. After all, for the six hundred visitors to the camp too young to remember World War II, this was the first major attack on Norwegian soil in their lifetimes.
For the decade she had been running the camp, Bøsei and her partner, Jon Olsen, had watched young enthusiasts meet, make friends, and mix together political discussion and good times at the idyllic retreat. Concerned about a terrorist force still being active, Jon, who was also the boat captain, guided the MS Thorbjørn ferry across 600 meters of silent water in the evening’s mist. Who was this Officer Nilsen he would be picking up? And what would he tell them about the terrorist or terrorists? Wouldn’t the island of Utøya disappearing behind him now, with all its safe buildings among the forest and outcroppings of rocks, be safe from some mad bomber?
At first glance, the man waiting on the dock could have been straight out of a futuristic war film. Dressed in black trousers, a multi-pocketed vest with the word POLITI on its right breast, the man, especially with all his commando-like garb worn over what appeared to be a skin-tight wet suit, was unlike any policeman Jon Olsen had ever seen.
Back on the island, Monica Bøsei noticed how all the youths had been following the news of the Oslo bombing and its immediate aftermath. The bomb had damaged the offices of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, and Bøsei was sure this would prevent the prime minister from making his planned visit to the youth festival the next day.
When Jon and the passenger stepped onto the shore, they were met by Bøsei and Trond Berntsen, an off-duty policeman who worked as a volunteer at the camp. Berntsen was also the stepbrother of Crown Princess Mette-Marit.
Upon noticing the policeman’s kit bag and the way in which his assault rifle was equipped with sniper sights and bayonet, Bøsei gasped audibly. She looked closer at the well-built, handsome, blond young man and told him he had better hide his weapon. “It will frighten the children,” she said, referring to all the teens and young adults camped on the island.
After the introductions, Jon and Trond placed the passenger’s heavy bag into a truck and Jon began driving it up the slope, parking it behind the main house. The newcomer impressed the curious island regulars with his polite and professional demeanor. But soon, Berntsen’s police instincts had begun to gnaw at his conscience.
“Why is your dress and kit not standard police issue?” he asked, as he and Bøsei began leading the young man up the incline from the beach. “And what’s with the iPod and water pack?”
“I’ll brief you thoroughly once we reach the main house,” the man assured him.
Evidently still somewhat baffled by this stranger from out of nowhere, Berntsen started to phrase another question but was stopped in his tracks. The man had put a pistol to his temple so calmly, yet so swiftly, that the veteran policeman hadn’t been able to react.
Monica Bøsei had caught sight of the pistol. “Don’t point it,” she said, as if a simple rule of safety had been broken. Certainly this young officer of the law would know better. “Don’t point it,” she repeated, this time in a shriek.
Then a sound echoed across the island like thunder in the rain-darkened air and she watched Berntsen go down. As his blood spattered the grass at her feet, she instinctively began to run, no doubt hoping that she might have time to warn the “children.”
But quickly she too went down.
Pleased, Anders Behring Breivik turned to the fallen Berntsen and fired two more shots into his victim’s head at such close range, one could have measured it in inches. Then, as if still doubting his specially crafted hollow-point shells’ capability of blowing human faces and bodies into atoms, he walked down the path and repeated his actions upon Bøsei’s supine form.
From the camp up above, where many youths had been discussing the news about the bombing and preparing for their involvement in the evening programs, shouts answered the ringing echoes of the shots. Some of them actually saw the man walking unhurriedly up toward the three main buildings and then turning left to where the students had pitched their tents. Many who were witnessing this bizarre scenario wondered if it was all a drill or a sick joke. Who would be pretending to shoot? Was the sound from fireworks? The man looked like a policeman, a savior. Why would he be carrying such weaponry? Why had he been firing, and whom did he want to kill?
Breivik was on the move. He faced a girl, maybe nineteen or twenty, coming out of the shower facility. Perhaps the sound of gunshots and shouts had been lost to her under the spray of the showers and, while she dressed, to the music from her earphones. A few feet away, she calmly slowed her pace. Her half-smile changed to a mask of horror when she saw the gun. Breivik’s aim was superb. His head shot produced a plume of blood in the air behind her, and the girl’s lifeless form fell, splayed on the ground before him. “Yes!” he said triumphantly. Breivik watched her feet jerk, fired once more for good measure, and then moved on again.
By his own admission later, after his apprehension, his actions were mechanical and inhuman as he proceeded toward the cafeteria building. Near the building, a group of the campers were out in the open, zigzagging in panic. Some bolted upright, some crouched, all hoping not to be spotted and somehow spared. Breivik picked out one boy, shot him eight times and then another boy five times. Through the cafeteria windows, eyewitnesses, frozen in indecision, watched in horror as he murdered five girls with what someone counted as eighteen bullets.
Was Breivik counting his weapon’s discharges or how many he had killed? He later admitted to having no feelings of remorse as he killed one helpless victim after another. Always the planner, he was determined to circle the entire island. He knew no one would try to stop him, as no one on the island was armed except him. So, his strategy was straightforward; he would get rid of everyone along the way.
Before hunting down the youths fleeing into the woods, he darted into the buildings and, in an execution-style manner, shot to death the students too paralyzed with fear to move.
As he shot, he shouted “I’m going to kill you all!”
On the southern tip of Utøya, where scattered rocks marked trails toward Tyrifjorden Bay’s cold waters, Breivik noticed clothes and personal belongings strewn on the ground: shirts and pants, shoes, phones, watches, and wallets, all left by campers as they stripped down to swim away from his onslaught. Using his pistol, he killed the ones who hadn’t yet braved the water and those who hadn’t made it far enough from shore, where they hoped to stay clear of the bullets. Laughing at the distance the swimmers had managed to put between themselves and the shore, he began firing at them with his assault rifle.
“Like shooting ducks in a pond,” a wounded survivor would later remark.
By this time, many of the students’ cell-phone calls had been getting through to family and friends at home, begging them to alert the police and come to their rescue. But because of the chaos in downtown Oslo, the police’s emergency lines were saturated. Even after the police had been alerted, it took them almost an hour and a half to get to Utøya. One can only imagine the emotion of the youths and their families during that ninety minutes.
; Survivors later spoke of how each moment seemed an eternity as they hid, played dead among the brush and rocks near the beach, or paddled off in the icy water, trying to disappear for just one more click of time, all hoping, praying the man with the gun would cease firing. Parents spoke of the agony they endured, not knowing if their children would be able to hide from the shooter, and their frustration with the police’s lack of response.
Later, Breivik granted two males a stay of execution, dropping his weapon after holding them in his sights. The eleven-year-old son of Berntsen, the veteran policeman who had become his first victim an hour or so earlier, had stood up in the water and pleaded for his life. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “You have killed enough. You have killed my father. Let us be.”
Somehow the remark stopped Breivik, and he moved quickly on, focusing on another potential victim, Adrian Pracon, who also survived the massacre. This survivor was also in the water, exhausted and sputtering his plea to be spared. As we will examine later in this book, Breivik saw something in the young man that reminded him of himself. At any rate, Breivik passed him by for some reason.
About an hour into his attack on the island, Breivik dialed 112 (the Norwegian version of 911). But he too experienced saturated phone lines. Afterward, he said he had tried at least ten times before he managed to get through. After finally being routed to the North Buskerud Police Department, he informed the operator that he was willing to surrender. It has been established that he continued to kill after placing this call and kept on even after he made a second call some thirty minutes later. He had completed his mission on behalf of the Knights Templar, Europe, and Norway, he told the operator who answered the call. “It’s acceptable to surrender to Delta,” he said, referring to the elite police force in Norway.
Both calls were dropped from the record.
The authorities were completely unprepared. Police headquarters couldn’t communicate with the cars heading to the scene, and those at various police stations nearby didn’t know who was on their way or what they were doing. The first car of Delta officers went to the wrong ferry landing. Although they eventually managed to get a boat, it was so small and so heavily loaded that it had to stop in the middle of the lake, short of the island. The officers aboard were forced to wait until a tourist boat came by. They commandeered the boat and finally managed to get to the island.
The real heroes that day were those in the tourist boats, who risked their lives by rescuing many of the young people from the lake’s icy water, who otherwise would have drowned or been shot. Had they not picked up these youngsters, the loss of life would have been even greater.
Two Delta squads arrived on the island at approximately 6:25 P.M., in boats they had commandeered, about ninety minutes after Breivik came ashore on the MS Thorbjørn ferry. Having no idea that there was only one killer, they kept searching the island for others even after apprehending Breivik. Yet all the survivors described the same perpetrator. The stories were the same.
“Methodical.”
“Like a robot.”
“Laughing as he killed.”
“Coming back to shoot again and again, as if he didn’t want to leave a single soul alive.”
“Gleefully firing bullet after bullet into teenagers, both male and female, as if they were armed warriors in a war game instead of young innocent kids.”
As he walked around the island, Breivik would call out for everyone to gather around him, luring them from their hiding places, saying he was a police officer, and that he was there to save them. And those who came out were then shot execution-style.
The Delta squads concentrated their search in the areas where they believed the shooter might put up a last stand. One of the spots they suspected turned out to be correct, but there would be no “come and get me” shootout.
Anders Behring Breivik, whom no one in Delta had ever heard of before, was found in a clearing, his assault weapon on the ground before him, his pistol in its holster, and his arms outstretched, not in the usual position of surrender with arms straight over his head but out to his sides, palms up in a pose that suggested religious fervor.
THE REACTION
He had done his best to spread the word, to become known to all. A lesser man, he thought, would not have lasted the course. The physical strength it took to load the bomb would have been too much for any normal man. And on the island, he had shot hundreds of rounds for an hour and a half, his last shots ripping apart the body of a sixteen-year-old boy who could run no longer and plead no further to be forgiven the grown man’s wrath.
While the Delta team squared him in their sights, they ordered him down on his knees. Seeing his bulging vest, they thought perhaps he had a bomb strapped around his chest and didn’t want him to approach them. At this point, they had no idea how many people he had killed and were totally unprepared for the horror of what had occurred. Breivik didn’t respond at first, either unable to hear or, at least, comprehend the command.
“On your knees!” the Delta leader repeated.
“How do you want me?” Breivik finally asked, grinning slightly at the mixed shouts as to how he should surrender to their liking.
Håvard Gåsbakk, a police officer assigned to make the arrest, thought the capture was unreal. How could this man, after what he had done, be so pleasantly compliant? In fact, the man was trying to convince his captors that he had nothing against them personally.
“I look at you as brothers,” he said, trying to make a connection. “I am a commander of the Norwegian anti-communist resistance movement.”
Cuffed and guarded, Breivik had about an hour of lying on the ground in the clearing to think about how he had been perceived by the men sent to pick him up. Two more boatloads of policemen arrived, and the more curious in the bunch must have further exemplified how far from being his brother they actually were. In their grumbling, Breivik must have been told several times that his “anti-communist resistance movement” was unknown to them and meant nothing against the measure of his crimes. Inspector Gåsbakk listened to Breivik emphasize how there were two more cells still on the move. A statement like that must have sent a chill through him. More terror on that day was the one thing all of Norway feared. How could all that terror be the work of one killer? Others must have been involved.
The inspector checked Breivik’s identity and called his headquarters to ask that Anders Behring Breivik’s background be researched immediately. Who was he? And what kind of organizations was he tied to? Then they led him, handcuffed, to the second floor of the camp’s main building. Gåsbakk’s reaction to this man’s suggestion that two more cells were on the warpath was to have Breivik stripped to his shorts, inspect his body for a bomb or more weapons, and then interrogate him for the remainder of the night.
It had become darker, the rain still falling. Private craft out on the water were still doing their best to bring in the few survivors. Some had hoisted the dead and near-dead onto their boats. Helicopters had finally reached the island. There had been one hovering over the scene during the killing spree, but it had been one of Norway’s state TV channel choppers, able only to send back video of the teenagers running and climbing for their lives. Now, police aircraft were directing the squads of lawmen and volunteer tourists and survivors toward the youths who had climbed the rocks to hide in the small caves the coastline offered. At the bottom of these outcroppings, the young people who hadn’t been able to escape the killer’s scope in time were being collected, most of them dead or critically wounded.
And here was this man, standing, nearly naked, on the main house’s second floor, flexing his muscles in an Atlas pose. Then, while the members of Delta and the Oslo Police Department stared in disbelief, Breivik dropped his hand in front of his face to inspect his finger. In a sincere voice, he asked if someone could provide him with a Band-Aid.
Gåsbakk studied him. This man, with all the death he had caused, some of the corpses still lying within his sight, was worried about a scratch
on his finger. “You’ll get no Band-Aid from me,” he said. “It’s not exactly a high priority.”
Back in his uniform, Breivik posed for police photographers. He pleaded for water, explaining how the cocktail he had drunk earlier was affecting him. He needed water, or he would die of dehydration. No one hurried to comply with his demand. He must have been going into a slump, perhaps a letdown, wondering if he had accomplished enough to warrant the glory he had hoped for. He had expected hatred, but he must have been wondering why no one of higher authority had been sent out to interrogate him. When Ørjan Tombre arrived, he became more alert.
Tombre was a superintendent with the Special Operations Unit of Oslo’s organized crime section. Breivik may have heard of him, but he didn’t seem impressed. He felt he deserved someone higher up the chain of command, a member of PST, Norway’s Police Security Service. Told that that wasn’t going to happen, Breivik simmered in silence.
Tombre’s methods seemed standard procedure. They needed an initial interrogation, to establish who this monster was. They needed to learn his motive—and, even more important, whether there were any more killers on the island.
Breivik answered by displaying the Knights Templar symbol he wore around his neck. “My life ended,” he said, “when I ordained myself to the Knights Templar of Europe.” Pleased to have an audience of some magnitude, he explained how his organization had been established in London. Proudly, he declared that the Knights Templar would take over Europe within sixty years. “We are the crusaders and nationalists.”
He felt that that was a good time to establish his own power and importance with this official, to explain how his acts should be regarded as sympathetic, not criminal. After all, he had taken lives that would soon have become “extreme Marxists leading to the Islamization of Norway.”
The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer Page 12
