AS NORWAY buried the first victims of last Friday’s gun and bomb attacks yesterday, prime minister Jens Stoltenberg said the “evil” events of July 22nd had brought out the best in his Nordic nation.
Norway came to a standstill at 3.26pm yesterday to remember the 76 victims of the bomb attack in Oslo’s government quarter and shooting spree on nearby Utoeya island.
Police said yesterday they had identified all the victims, ahead of the first funeral yesterday, of Bano Rashid (18), a Kurdish immigrant who fled from Iraq to Norway with her family in 1996.
Friends wept as she was buried after a Muslim-Christian service near Oslo, her white coffin draped in the Kurdish flag.
With the small wooden church in the town of Nesodden overflowing, many mourners listened to the service on loudspeakers outside.
“I think July 22nd will be a very strong symbol of the Norwegian people’s wish to be united in our fight against violence,” Mr Stoltenberg said at a ceremony at his Labour Party headquarters in central Oslo, as members held aloft red roses, the party symbol. July 22nd “will become a symbol of how the nation can answer with love”.
Eskil Pedersen, head of the Labour youth organisation that organised the island summer camp, vowed to return to Utoeya next year to mark the first anniversary. The victims and their loved ones would decide how the date would be remembered, not the perpetrator, he said.
“We will forever be the July 22nd generation,” he said. “Long before he [Anders Behring Breivik] stands before a court, we can say he has lost.”
Investigators conducted their second interrogation of Breivik yesterday, a week after apprehending him on Utoeya island armed with a pistol and semi-automatic rifle and dressed as a police officer.
He confessed to shooting teenagers and organisers of a Labour Party youth camp on the island, killing 69, having detonated a powerful bomb two hours earlier in central Oslo that killed eight people. Although Breivik admitted to the attacks, he denied criminal guilt because he believed he was in a state of war, his lawyer and police have said.
After pleading not guilty to terrorism charges, he was remanded in custody for eight weeks.
Investigators say he remained calm during yesterday’s questioning and said nothing to back up his claim that he was part of a militant pan-European anti-Muslim cell.
His defence lawyer, Geir Lippestad, said yesterday he was determined to “defend Breivik without being identified with him”.
“With an act of this nature, in such a unique situation, it’s not wrong to describe it as a cruel act,” he told the tabloid VG. “You have to say that or you are not human.”
At 3.26pm, exactly a week after the bomb blast, Mr Stoltenberg attended a ceremony in Oslo's largest mosque to pay tribute to Ms Rashid and another Muslim victim, Ismail Haji Ahmed (19), a dancer who last year appeared on Norway's Got Talent.
“We are a community, across religion, ethnicity, gender and rank,” he said. “Bano is Norwegian, Ismail is Norwegian, I am Norwegian. We are Norway. I’m proud of that.”#
Minute's silence for dead: social meida pays respects
A MINUTE of social media silence in honour of the victims of last week’s shooting and bomb attack in Norway was observed at 5pm yesterday. The #twinutesilence campaign was started by four Dublin-based friends who said they did not wish to be publicly identified as they did not want to be accused of seeking publicity.
The campaign had generated a huge amount of attention across the world over the last few days.
It called on people not to use any social media for one minute yesterday at 5pm Irish time to create an online silence “in memory of the lives lost and the families and friends left behind in Norway after Friday’s bomb attack and shooting massacre in Oslo”.
The organisers used their Twitter and Facebook accounts to get global support. Within hours #twinutesilence was trending in Ireland, Norway and Sweden. CONOR POPE