A truck parked next to the main residential block of the Norwegian government housing the headquarters of the Norwegian Cabinet and several ministries, exploded on July 22, 2011. The blast hit the headquarters of Norway’s largest newspaper, Verdens Gang, causing mass destruction in the area, leaving bodies temporarily in the rubble so that police could gather evidence for the investigation. Rescue teams and ambulances rushed to the scene where residents were evacuated from their homes. Several people were seen lying on the ground, their faces covered in blood, while field units were set up to treat the injured. Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg was unharmed, because he was outside the building, but 11 people were killed and more than 209 others were injured.
Two hours after the horrific bombing, a gunman stormed a summer camp for the youths of the ruling Norwegian Labour Party on Utøya Island and fired indiscriminately at participants, killing 77 and wounding 111.
This is how the Oslo attack was the deadliest in Norway since World War II and the largest act of terrorism in Western Europe since the 2005 London transport bombings that killed 52 people. The attacker was far-right Anders Behring Breivik, born in 1979 in London, whose father worked at the Norwegian embassy in Britain.
Plotting
Investigations with Breivik revealed that he began planning terrorist acts in 2002, at the age of twenty-three. He has engaged for years in discussions online, has always spoken out against Islam and immigrants, and has been planning the attacks since 2009, but has concealed his intentions.
Breivik decided to obtain weapons legally from his country, because he had a clean criminal record. He bought a semi-automatic rifle for hunting deer and a Glock gun. Breivik owned an organic farming company known as Breivik Geofarm, which he used to buy some dual-use agricultural supplies, such as fertilizers, to help him manufacture the bomb he detonated in the Oslo bombing. The company, however, admitted that the last shipment it received was six tonnes of fertilizers.
In the mass shooting, Breivik disguised as a policeman and entered the youth camp, claiming he wanted to make sure everyone was safe after the Oslo explosion, and called on people to approach him, saying “Okay. You are safe, we have come to help you”. About 20 young men approached him, and that is when he shot them at close range. Then, using two firearms for more than half an hour, he shot at the rest of the participants, without anyone intercepting him. The police did not even arrive at the scene until about an hour and a half later.
Trial
Breivik’s trial started on April 16 to June 22, 2012, in Oslo District Court, where he confessed to perpetrating the attacks, without pleading guilty, claiming that what he did was to “change society”, and rejecting the defense’s arguments that he was insane.
On August 24, 2012, a Norwegian court sentenced Breivik to 21 years in prison, the maximum sentence allowed in Norway, in so-called “preventive imprisonment”, which means that officials can prevent a convict’s release indefinitely as long as he is deemed a threat to society.
The massacre shook the Norwegian society and the whole world, drawing its attention to the dangers of far-right terrorism, and still leaving its mark to date. On the tenth memorial of the massacre, the current Secretary General of NATO and Norwegian Prime Minister at the time of the massacre, Jens Stoltenberg, said in a speech at the Oslo Cathedral “Ten years ago, our response to hatred was love ... But hatred still exists here”.
Some survivors of the massacre said that their country has not yet held accountable the far-right ideology, and that Breivik’s crime did not end at the borders of Norway but was a model that prompted the commission of similar crimes, most notably the deadly attack on the Christchurch mosques in New Zealand in 2019. In the same week, Norwegian intelligence services issued a warning that “the ideas that motivated the attack continue to be a driving force for right-wing extremists nationally and globally and have been a factor in the commission of several terrorist attacks over the past ten years”.
Thoughts of the Criminal
Breivik joined the Progress Party, a right-wing organization, in 1999 and worked with the party’s youth movement. However, he left in 2006 because, in his view, it was too open to multiculturalism and did not defend “northern identity, culture, and traditions”. He then fully developed fascist and Nazi ideologies and established an anti-Islam website, taking a hardline stance against foreigners and immigrants, as well as the tolerant ruling Labour Party.
On the day of the massacre, Breivik published a long-form testimony of 1500 pages online, detailing his doctrinal commitment to the fight against Islam and Marxism in the last nine years, the defining moment being the fall of 2009, when he decided to carry out his terrorist act. He identified himself as the “commander of the Justiciar Knights” similar to the Crusader Knights and listed the European countries that should be targeted, arranged according to the percentage of Muslims in them, France taking first place. He justified his crime as a kind of “using terrorism as a means to awaken the masses”.