Gunman’s call to police went unanswered
Breivik killed while waiting, apologizes to some victims
The Norwegian who massacred 77 people to protest against Muslim immigration to Europe said Monday he had hoped to kill as many as 150 and kept on killing because police failed to respond urgently to his phone call.
Breivik has given a detailed account of his car bomb attack at government headquarters in Oslo on July 22, which killed eight people, followed hours later by his shooting of 69 people, mostly teenagers, at a Labour party island camp. He said on Monday his “gruesome” actions were to prevent a civil war caused, he said, by a Muslim takeover of Europe. “This was a minor barbarity to prevent a larger one,” he said on the sixth day of a trial.
“I’ve never ever experienced such a horrendous . . . gruesome act as this. But it was necessary,” Breivik said in his usual tone, lacking emotion. “It was much more cruel than I expected.”
Breivik said he thought that at least another 150 people had drowned in a lake as they fled his gunfire so he called police to surrender, only to find himself forced to leave a message.
“I said ‘call me back when you got the right person,’ ” Breivik said. “I told myself ‘I will continue until the phone rings.’ I thought, I will continue until I die. What would I have done, sat by the pier waiting?”
Breivik has denied criminal guilt, insisting his victims were “traitors” whose multiculturalist views facili-tated what he saw as a defacto Muslim invasion of Europe. Breivik has had almost free rein to issue warnings against immigration and explain how he scoured the Internet for bomb- making information while writing a 1,500-page document declaring himself part of a secretive group that is Europe’s answer to al-qaeda.
Breivik said he spared some people, including a 10-year-old boy whose father was his first victim, and a Labour party activist because he looked right-wing.
“Some people have the type of look that is associated with the leftist movement,” Breivik said.
“This person, (Adrian) Pracon appeared right-wing; that was his appearance. That’s the reason I didn’t fire any shots at him,” said Breivik, 33, whose sanity or lack of it is a prime issue to be determined in the trial.
Pracon, a 22-year-old Labour party youth wing activist, earlier said: “I remember him pointing the gun at me for quite a long time before he took it down, turned and walked away.”
Breivik issued his first seeming apology, to bystanders hurt or killed when his 950-kg fertilizer bomb went off in Oslo. More than 200 were injured.
“To all of those . . . I want to say I am deeply sorry for what happened,” he said. “But what happened, happened.”