The gunman behind last year’s Norway massacres said he would “do it again” as he took the stand at his trial on Tuesday, after a judge who called for him to face the death penalty was dismissed. Granted clearance to deliver a lengthy address to the court, Anders Behring Breivik described his killing of 77 people as a “preventive” attack to defend ethnic Norwegians and avoid a European culture war with Muslims.
And after describing Christians as “a persecuted minority,” the 33-year-old asked the court to free him while making clear he had no remorse over last July’s bomb attack in central Oslo and shooting spree on a nearby island. “Yes, I would have done it again,” Breivik told the court on the second day of the trial, adding that spending his life in prison or dying for his people would be “the biggest honour.”
On July 22 last year, Breivik first killed eight people when he set off a bomb in a van parked at the foot of buildings housing the offices of Labour Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who was not present at the time. He then travelled to Utoeya island where, dressed as a police officer, he spent more than an hour methodically shooting at hundreds of people attending a ruling Labour Party youth summer camp.
The shooting spree claimed the lives of 69 people, mostly teens trapped on the small heart-shaped island surrounded by icy waters. It was the deadliest massacre ever committed by a lone gunman.
Breivik on Tuesday evoked the idea of accomplices, telling the court that two other one-person “cells” existed. “I am a self-run and independent cell, and I am connected to two others,” he told the Oslo District Court. In his address to the judges, Breivik compared the Labour Party’s youth wing AUF to the Hitler Youth, saying he targetted them on Utoeya because “most AUFs are naive and indoctrinated.”
“These were not innocent children, but political activists,” Breivik argued, as survivors and relatives of the victims shook their heads in disbelief and grew impatient for him to finish.
Television and radio were banned from broadcasting his words as there had been widespread concerns prior to the trial that Breivik would use his testimony as a platform to spread his ideology to the masses. Breivik described his attacks as “the most spectacular operation conducted by a militant nationalist this century” and claimed that “rivers of blood caused by Muslims” are now flowing in European cities. “Multiculturalism is a self-destructive ideology,” he said, expressing disdain for Norway’s generous immigration policy.
The chief judge Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen interrupted his testimony after he spent his allotted 30 minutes presenting his Islamophobic and anti-immigration ideology. At one stage, Arntzen warned Breivik to tone down his rhetoric.
