Anders Behring Breivik has told a court that his "primary target" in last year's terrorist attacks was a former prime minister whom he planned to behead, posting the footage on the internet – and that he anticipated all 564 people on Utøya would die in his "operation".
Giving evidence on the fourth day of his trial, the 33-year-old said he would have preferred to carry out three bomb attacks rather than target Utøya, where the Norwegian Labour party was holding its annual youth summer camp on 22 July last year. In the end, he went on the rampage on the island after planting one bomb in Oslo's government district, killing eight people.
Breivik claimed he was "forced" to carry out the massacre on the island, which left 69 dead, because Norwegian and EU regulations had made it difficult to acquire sufficient bomb-making equipment.
Bombing was much easier on the emotions than pulling a gun trigger, he said. "It's easy to press a button and detonate a bomb. It's very, very difficult to carry out something as barbaric as a firearm-based action."
To do so, he claimed, was not natural. "It is contrary to human nature to execute something like this," he said. "You have to work on yourself for a very long time to make yourself do this ... to hammer away at your emotions."
His original plan for the attack on Utøya was to time his arrival on the island with a visit from Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former Labour prime minister of Norway. Breivik told the court he planned to handcuff her, before "decapitating" her using a bayonet on his rifle and then filming the execution on an iPhone.
"The plan was to chop her head off with [the bayonet] while reading a text and then upload the film to the internet," he said. Brundtland was his main target, said Breivik, adding that he nonetheless expected everyone else on the island to die. "The objective was not to kill 69 people on Utøya. The objective was to kill all of them," he said, explaining that he planned to scare the campers into the water. » | Helen Pidd | Oslo | Thursday, April 19, 2012
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