The right-wing extremist who killed dozens of teenagers in Norway told police he had originally planned to capture and execute leading Labour Party politicians whom he viewed as traitors, a newspaper reported.
The Norwegian VG tabloid, citing leaked police interrogations with Anders Behring Breivik, reported on Friday that Breivik’s aim was to kill former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere or Eskil Pedersen, head of the Labour Party’s youth wing.
However, only Pedersen was present when the 32-year-old Norwegian arrived at the Labour Party youth camp on July 22 after setting off a bomb that killed eight people in Oslo. Pedersen survived Breivik’s attack, but 69 other people were killed at the Utoeya Island camp.
The newspaper’s account paints a picture of a determined killer who planned the attacks in minute detail and who became even more determined to carry out the massacre at Utoya once he realized that the Oslo building he had bombed didn’t collapse.
VG said Breivik’s initial plan was to take one of the leading Labour Party officials hostage at Utoeya and read a death sentence before carrying out an execution. He had prepared a speech for that, which he later recited to investigators, it said.
Gahr Stoere had visited Utoeya the day before, while Brundtland had left the island just hours before Breivik arrived.
VG executives declined to say how the paper obtained the interrogation details. However, police released a statement calling it “unfortunate” that classified documents from the investigation had leaked. It said the documents had been made available to police, defense lawyers and lawyers representing survivors and the families of victims.
Police attorney Pal-Fredrik Hjort Kraby added: “This is not information that to a large extent will harm the investigation” and said police would investigate the leak.
Spokesmen for Gahr Stoere and Pedersen declined to comment on the report. Brundtland’s spokesman didn’t immediately return calls.
Breivik, who surrendered to a SWAT team on Utoeya, has confessed to the attacks, but pleaded not guilty to terror charges, claiming he was in a state of war and therefore not criminally liable. At his first public court hearing on Monday, he declared himself a military commander of a Norwegian resistance movement before the judge cut him off.
In a 1,500-page document posted online before the attacks, Breivik laid out a blueprint for a nationalist revolution to overthrow governments he claims have let their countries down by allowing Muslim immigrants to settle in Europe.
VG said Breivik sent his online manifesto to 1,003 recipients from his mother’s apartment before driving a van packed with a 950kg fertilizer bomb to downtown Oslo. He parked the van outside the main government building, ignited the fuse with a lighter, locked the car and walked away.
“I was very nervous at the moment when I lit up and thought that there is no way back and that I possibly would die in two seconds,” VG quoted Breivik telling police.
He went to a getaway car a few blocks away in which he had at least 500 rounds of ammunition, a flak jacket, plastic handcuffs and two devices for quick loading of gun clips.
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