Norway survivors recount island horror

The farm in the village of Aasta lies in a pine forest on the banks of the Glomma River about 160 kilometers north of Oslo and was a picture of calm under a light drizzle that brought out the scent of the trees.

Police officers took cordoned off the farm, leased by Anders Behring Breivik two months ago, Friday evening.

The 32-year-old has been held for Friday's massacre of at least 85 young people on a tiny island hosting a summer camp for the youth wing of the ruling Labor party and car bomb blast in Oslo's government district that killed at least seven.

Policemen, one wearing blue overalls and a surgical mask hanging below his chin, and a soldier dressed in army fatigues paced across the yard and in-and-out of a red barn facing the small white farmhouse.

Local police chief Ove Osgjelten allowed a small group of reporters to enter the perimeter marked by police tape to view and photograph the farmyard from a short distance. He declined to give details of the police operation under way.

In front of one outbuilding, along a road leading down a gentle slope to the house, stood a half a dozen thick white sacks of fertilizer. Many fertilizers contain a substance that can also be a key ingredient in a forceful explosive.

Authorities said Saturday that the death toll from twin attacks had reached 92, with 85 victims — mostly young people — in the rampage targeting a youth camp of the ruling Labor Party on Utoya and at least seven in a massive bomb blast that occurred shortly beforehand in the center of Oslo. Four people are still missing.

Police said the suspected gunman, Anders Behring Breivik, described as a Christian fundamentalist with extreme right-wing views, put up no resistance when officers finally arrived on Utoya to apprehend him. He has admitted firing on hundreds of people gathered on the island outside Oslo for the summer retreat, police said.

It was a methodical massacre that went on, incredibly, for at least 60 minutes. Terrified youths were hunted down as they cowered inside bathrooms, scrambled through bushes on the heavily wooded island and dived into the icy waters to try to escape.

With a sniper's calm, the gunman picked them off on land and in the water, using a handgun and an automatic weapon. Even more frightening, he was dressed in a police uniform, which made some desperate survivors uncertain whether help or more hell had come when the real officers showed up.

"Who could we trust?" a survivor named Khamshajiny Gunaratnam wrote on her blog.

Breivik is also suspected of setting off the car bomb in Oslo. An agricultural cooperative reported Saturday that Breivik, 32, had ordered six metric tons of artificial fertilizer to be delivered to his farmhouse in Asta, a sparsely populated community about 2 1/2 hours north of Oslo, at the beginning of May.

Because he owned a farm, the purchase seemed legitimate, though large, authorities said. But such fertilizer can also be used to make explosives, as was the case in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, carried out by anti-government Army veteran Timothy McVeigh.

About four to five metric tons were found at Breivik's farmhouse, Oslo Deputy Police Chief Sveinung Sponheim said. Investigators are now trying to determine whether other bombs might be planted elsewhere.

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said government workers were among the dead. The remains of some victims are still to be recovered from inside the heavily damaged buildings in downtown Oslo, police said.

Although the huge explosion appeared meant to kill on a large scale, it also served as a diversion from — and a set-up for — the real slaughter to come on Utoya, less than an hour away from downtown Oslo.

Simen Mortensen, a volunteer for the summer camp, was stationed on the mainland side of the ferry service to Utoya. He told the Verdens Gang newspaper that a man wearing a police uniform and a bulletproof vest pulled up in a silver vehicle. The man was armed with a pistol and an automatic weapon with a telescopic lens.

"He gets out of the car and shows identification. Says he's been sent to check on security, that this is routine, in connection with the terrorist attack," Mortensen said. "Everything looks fine, and a boat is called to ferry him over to Utoya.

Anders Behring Breivik: motives of a mass murderer

Three times, Adrian Pracon prepared to die on Utoya island, a Norwegian paradise turned to hell Friday. Friends he laughed with earlier in the day fell one by one in a gunman's hail of fire.

He survived to tell a horrifying tale Saturday.

When the shooting started Friday afternoon, many of the 600 people at the ruling Labour Party's youth camp ran down a hill and to the water. The shooter came after them, screaming.

"You are all going to die!"

Pracon was one of the last ones remaining between the shooter and the water and didn't have time to take his heavy clothes or boots off. About 100 meters into the chilly water, he realized he would not make it. He would drown with all that weight.

"I felt I couldn't breathe. I already swallowed too much water," he said. "I felt the clothes pulling me down.

The key thing is always motive," said David Wilson, professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, and author of A History of British Serial Killing. "I am sure that, as things become clearer, we will discover there was a mixture of the political and the personal."

The political seems relatively obvious. The bomb target was a government building and the mass shooting occurred at a youth rally for the incumbent political party. "The personal is more difficult to work out at this stage," Wilson said. "It's usually a grudge."

Wilson drew comparisons with the case of Derrick Bird, who killed 12 people on a shooting spree in Cumbria. "Bird was a clear case of the political and the personal. He felt people were trying to steal his taxi customers, that's personal, and he felt he was being unfairly chased for taxes – political."

Breivik's Facebook page suggests he held strong Christian beliefs, enjoyed playing World of Warcraft fantasy games and was a fan of the psychologist William James and philosopher John Stuart Mill whose treatise On Liberty warns against the "tyranny of the majority".

"If I were speculating, I would guess he was annoyed because of the Christian fundamentalism far-right idea that Norway's accessible open culture was being undermined by immigration," Wilson said. Early reports suggested the killings were carried out by a "deranged gunman". But Wilson said this was not the case. "This man was making a point that was very clearly thought through. [He] had a uniform – he was dressed as a policeman– he had planned well enough to have weapons (and ammunition) that he was going to shoot for two hours; he spoke to the kids saying, 'Gather round, I want to ask you some questions,' and then shot them and, crucially, he did not take his own life. This is somebody who is not ashamed of what he did. This man was making a point."

Both spree and serial killings in Scandinavia are rare. Finland witnessed two school spree shootings in 2007 and 2008 carried out by disaffected young men who felt they had been let down as pupils.

Wilson, who has visited Norway many times to study its liberal sentencing policies, asked: "How will Norway react to the appalling events? Will they only sentence this guy to 21 years the maximum sentence a criminal can receive in the country.

Questions, too, will be asked about the country's liberal gun laws. Shooting and hunting are major pastimes in Norway, and guns are easy to obtain.