Norway killer practiced with online games
Anders Behring Breivik , 33, says he once spent a year playing video games, including role-playing online game “World of Warcraft,” and a first-person shooting game, to prepare for what he believed would be a suicide mission
NORWAY — The gunman behind Norway’s massacre told a court on Thursday he had meant to kill the entire government and said he used meditation, video shooting games and steroids to prepare for the slaughter.
Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered 77 people last July, also said he had planned a far greater bloodbath with three, not one, car bombs and a death toll of several hundred people when he went on his rampage.
The 33-year-old farright extremist also testified he had given his murder weapons names from Norse mythology, calling his rifle “Gungnir,” after Odin’s magical spear and his Glock pistol “Mjoelner,” after Thor’s hammer.
Mind-conditioning
And he revealed he had once spent a year playing video games, including role-playing online game “World of Warcraft,” and a first-person shooting game, to prepare for what he believed would be a suicide mission.
Breivik also practiced a form of Japanese medi- tation daily since 2006 to help block out his emotions during the attacks and said he was still meditating to help him get through the trial.
He has used testosterone since April last year and anabolic steroids on the day of the attacks, he said.
During his killing spree, he first blew up a van filled with 950 kilograms of explosives at the foot of the tower housing the offices of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who was not present at the time.
He then traveled to Utoeya island where, dressed as a police officer, he methodically shot for more than an hour at hundreds of people at a Labor Party youth summer camp, taking 69 lives, mostly teenagers.
Massacre
There were 569 people on the island that day, and Breivik testified that he would have liked to kill them all — including by beheading former premier Gro Harlem Brundtland and posting a video of her execution on the Internet.
In the bomb attack in Oslo, he said, “the aim of the attack on the government buildings was to kill the entire Norwegian Government, including the prime minister and everyone in the building.”
Breivik said that originally “the plan was three car bombs followed by a shooting.” He said he considered placing a second bomb near the headquarters of the Labor Party, which he accuses of triggering a “Muslim invasion” with its generous immigration policies.
For the third location, he considered parliament, Norway’s Aftenposten newspaper and City Hall, before deciding on the royal palace, although he insisted he had planned to warn the royal family so they would not be hurt.
Another target
He said he then planned to ride a motorcycle to a far-left squatter community, then to the Dagsavisen daily and finally to the head- quarters of the Socialist Left Party, “executing as many people as possible” in each place.
“The plan was to not to surrender before the whole plan had been carried out,” he told the court.
“It was a suicide mission where the probability of survival was equal to zero.”
Because it turned out to be much more difficult than he expected to build bombs, he ended up only bombing the government offices and then heading to Utoeya, where “the goal was to kill everybody.”
“I stand for Utoeya and what I did, and would still do it again,” he said.