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.

Anders Behring Breivik

Anders Behring Breivik,  is a Norwegian citizen, and the suspected perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks, although it is yet unknown if he acted alone. On 22 July 2011, he allegedly approached a Labour Party youth camp on Utøya island, posing as a police officer, and then indiscriminately opened fire on the adolescents present, reportedly killing at least 84. He has also been linked with the bomb blasts which had taken place approximately two hours earlier in Oslo. He was arrested on Utøya, and is currently in police custody. Following his apprehension, Breivik was characterized by officials as being a conservative right-wing extremist. According to Reuters and the BBC, deputy police chief Roger Andresen described the suspect as a "Christian fundamentalist.

Breivik studied at the Oslo Commerce School, and is described by newspaper Verdens Gang as conservative and nationalist. He is also a former member of the Progress Party (FrP) and its youth wing FpU. According to the current FpU leader Ove Vanebo, Breivik was active early in the 2000s, but he left the party as his viewpoints became more extreme. He expresses his sympathies for Winston Churchill, Geert Wilders and Norwegian anti-Nazi World War II hero Max Manus on his alleged Facebook profile.

According to the newspaper VG, he has no previous history with the police, apart from traffic violations. According to the same source, Breivik has a Glock pistol, a rifle and a shotgun registered to his name. Breivik moved in late June or early July to the rural small town of Rena in Åmot, Hedmark county, about 140 km (86 miles) northeast of Oslo, where he operated a farming sole proprietorship under the name "Breivik Geofarm. It has been speculated that he could have used the company as a cover legally to obtain large amounts of artificial fertilizer and other chemicals for the manufacturing of fertilizer explosives. According to Reuters, a farming supplier had sold the Breivik 6 tonnes of fertilizer in May.

80 Are Dead in Norway Shooting

OSLO, Norway - Norway's national broadcaster NRK has named the suspect in the Oslo bombing and youth camp shooting spree as Anders Behring Breivik.

NRK and other Norwegian media also posted pictures of the blond and blue-eyed Norwegian. NRK says police searched the 32-year-old's apartment in Oslo overnight.

Police have confirmed 17 deaths in the attacks and Friday evening said that at least 80 were killed at the youth camp where the gunman opened fire after setting off a bomb in Oslo.

The explosions, from one or more bombs, turned Oslo, a tidy Scandinavian capital, into a scene reminiscent of terrorist attacks in Beirut or Baghdad or Oklahoma City, panicking people and blowing out windows of several government buildings, including one housing the office of the Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, who was unharmed.

The state television broadcaster, citing the police, said seven people had been killed and at least 15 wounded in the explosions, which they said appeared to be an act of domestic terrorism.

Even as the police locked down a large area of the city after the blasts, a man dressed as a police officer entered the youth camp on the island of Utoya, about 19 miles northwest of Oslo, a Norwegian security official said, and opened fire. “He said it was a routine check in connection with the terror attack in Oslo,” one witness told VG Nett, the Web site of a national newspaper.

Norwegian authorities said they believed that a number of tourists were in the central district at the time of the explosion, and that the toll would surely have been higher if not for the fact that many Norwegians were on vacation and many more had left their offices early for the weekend.

“Luckily, it’s very empty,” said Stale Sandberg, who works in a government agency a few blocks down the street from the prime minister’s office.

After the explosions, the city filled with an unfamiliar sense of vulnerability. “We heard two loud bangs and then we saw this yellow smoke coming from the government buildings,” said Jeppe Bucher, 18, who works on a ferry boat less than a mile from the bomb site. “There was construction around there, so we thought it was a building being torn down.”

He added, “Of course I’m scared, because Norway is such a neutral country.”

American counterterrorism officials cautioned that Norway’s own homegrown extremists, with unknown grievances, could be responsible for the attacks.

Initial reports focused on the possibility of Islamic militants, in particular Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami, or Helpers of the Global Jihad, cited by some analysts as claiming responsibility for the attacks. American officials said the group was previously unknown and might not even exist.

Still, there was ample reason for concern that terrorists might be responsible. In 2004 and again in 2008, the No. 2 leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri, who took over after the death of Osama bin Laden, threatened Norway because of its support of the American-led NATO military operation in Afghanistan.

Norway has about 550 soldiers and three medevac helicopters in northern Afghanistan, a Norwegian defense official said. The government has indicated that it will continue to support the Afghan operations as long as the alliance needs partners on the ground.

Terrorism specialists said that even if the authorities ultimately ruled out terrorism as the cause of Friday’s assaults, other kinds of groups or individuals were mimicking Al Qaeda’s signature brutality and multiple attacks.

“If it does turn out to be someone with more political motivations, it shows these groups are learning from what they see from Al Qaeda,” said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington. “One lesson I take away from this is that attacks, especially in the West, are going to move to automatic weapons.”

Muslim leaders in Norway swiftly condemned the attacks. “This is our homeland, this is my homeland,” said Mehtab Afsar, secretary general of the Islamic Council of Norway. “I condemn these attacks, and the Islamic Council of Norway condemns these attacks, whoever is behind them.