THE MAN behind last Friday’s twin attacks in Norway has claimed he is part of an organisation with “cells all over Europe”.
At a closed-door remand hearing in Oslo yesterday, Anders Behring Breivik said his motivation was not to cause a huge loss of life but to protest against how the ruling Labour Party is “deconstructing Norwegian culture [by] mass-importing Muslims”.
“Any person with a conscience cannot allow his country to be colonised by Muslims,” the 32-year-old Oslo native told the court.
Facing several charges under Norway’s anti-terrorism laws, he was remanded in custody for a further eight weeks in solitary confinement.
Though Breivik pleaded not guilty to the charges, he has admitted detonating a powerful bomb in Oslo’s government quarter on Friday afternoon that killed eight.
Two hours later he went on a 90-minute shooting spree on an island 40km outside Oslo.
Norwegian police yesterday reduced the island death toll to 68, mostly teenagers attending a summer camp, as their search for missing victims continued.
Yesterday’s remand hearing took place behind closed doors after investigators filed a petition citing security concerns.
They said Breivik had bought more than six tonnes of fertilizer, presumably to use for bomb-making, through a Polish online dealer.
Polish investigators flagged the purchase in March and passed on the information to Norway’s customs officials and intelligence agency, according to the VG tabloid, but this was not followed up because Breivik had recently bought a Norwegian farm. A man was arrested in Poland yesterday on suspicion of selling bomb-making equipment to Breivik.
Norway observed a minute’s silence at noon yesterday in memory of the dead and injured. “We will not let fear break us,” prime minister Jens Stoltenberg told a “flower parade” in Oslo yesterday evening, attended by more than 100,000 people. “The response from people in Norway and from the whole world makes me sure of this one thing: evil can kill a single person, but never defeat a whole people.”
Breivik’s estranged father disowned his son on Norwegian television yesterday, saying he would never return to Norway. “I don’t feel like his father,” said Jens David Breivik, a retired diplomat.
“How could he kill so many innocent people and just seem to think that what he did was okay?"