A far-right militant who killed 77 people in Norway last year will use his trial to challenge a diagnosis that he is criminally insane, something that would be “worse than death”, he has claimed in a letter.
The trial of Anders Behring Breivik, who shot 69 people at a Labour Party youth camp after detonating a car bomb in central Oslo that killed eight, starts in Oslo on April 16th.
In November two court-appointed psychiatrists deemed the 33-year-old was psychotic and paranoid schizophrenic at the time of the attacks, which would normally mean he could not be sentenced to prison.
In a 38-page letter he wrote in jail and sent to various Norwegian media, Breivik said that being deemed criminally insane was unbearable to him.
“This is the worst thing that could have happened to me as it is the ultimate humiliation . . . To send a political activist to a mental hospital is more sadistic and evil than to kill him! It is a fate worse than death.”
Breivik has said he committed the attacks on July 22nd to protect Norway from multiculturalism. “I knew of course what was right and what was wrong, but I acted instinctively,” he wrote. – (Reuters)