Norwegian killer gets preventive detention

A Norwegian court sentenced Anders Behring Breivik to prison, denying prosecutors the insanity ruling they hoped would show that his massacre of 77 people was the work of a madman, not part of an anti-Muslim crusade.

Breivik smiled with apparent satisfaction when Judge Wenche Elisabeth Arntzen read the ruling, declaring him sane enough to be held criminally responsible and sentencing him to "preventive detention," which means it is unlikely he will ever be released.

The sentence brings a form of closure to Norway, which was shaken to its core by the bomb and gun attacks on July 22, 2011, because Breivik's lawyers said before the ruling that he would not appeal any ruling that did not declare him insane.

But it also means Breivik got what he wanted: a ruling that paints him as a political terrorist instead of a psychotic mass murderer. Since his arrest, Breivik has said the attacks were meant to draw attention to his extreme right-wing ideology and to inspire a multi-decade uprising by "militant nationalists" across Europe.

Prosecutors had argued Breivik was insane as he plotted his attacks to draw attention to a rambling "manifesto" that blamed Muslim immigration for the disintegration of European society.

Breivik argued that authorities were trying to cast him as sick to cast doubt on his political views, and said during the trial that being sent to an insane asylum would be the worst thing that could happen to him.

"He has always seen himself as sane so he isn't surprised by the ruling," Breivik's defense lawyer Geir Lippestad said.

The five-judge panel in the Oslo district court unanimously convicted Breivik, 33, of terrorism and premeditated murder and ordered him imprisoned for a period between 10 and 21 years, the maximum allowed under Norwegian law. Such sentences can be extended as long as an inmate is considered too dangerous to be released, and legal experts say Breivik will almost certainly spend the rest of his life in prison.

It was not clear whether prosecutors would appeal the ruling. If not, and if Breivik sticks to his word not to appeal a prison term, the legal process for one of the darkest chapters in Norwegian history will have come to a close.

Survivors of the attacks and relatives of victims welcomed the ruling.

"I am very relieved and happy about the outcome," said Tore Sinding Bekkedal, who survived the Utoya shooting.

"I believe he is mad, but it is political madness and not psychiatric madness," Bekkedal said. "He is a pathetic and sad little person."

Per Anders Langerod, another shooting survivor said he would like to visit Breivik in prison "and yell at him for 15 minutes."

"I don't want to hurt him because I have a problem with violence, now more than ever," Langerod told the AP. "But I want to yell at him. I want to explain to him what kind of egomaniac mass murderer he is and how he has affected so many people so terribly."

Wearing a dark suit and sporting a thin beard, Breivik smirked as he walked into the courtroom to hear his sentence, and raised a clenched-fist salute.

Breivik confessed to the attacks during the trial, describing in gruesome detail how he detonated a car bomb at the government headquarters in Oslo and then opened fire at the annual summer camp of the governing Labor Party's youth wing.

Eight people were killed and more than 200 injured by the explosion. Sixty-nine people, most of them teenagers, were killed in the shooting spree on Utoya island. The youngest victim was 14.

In testimony that stunned relatives of his victims, Breivik said he was acting in defense of Norway by targeting the left-wing political party he accused of betraying the country with liberal immigration policies.

Breivik's lawyers say he is already at work writing sequels to the 1,500-page manifesto he released on the Internet before the attacks. Breivik most likely will be sent back to Ila Prison, where he has been held in pretrial detention. He has access to a computer there but no Internet connection. He can communicate with the outside world through mail, which is checked by prison staff.

They can stop mail encouraging illegal acts or the creation of criminal networks, Ila Prison spokeswoman Ellen Bjercke said.

The impact of Breivik's violence has been huge. It has forced Norway to accept that terror doesn't come only in the guise of foreign fundamentalists, but can come from one of their own. The son of a Norwegian diplomat and a nurse who divorced when he was a child, Breivik had been a law-abiding citizen until the attacks, except for a brief spell of spray-painting graffiti during his youth.

The judges noted that Breivik's extreme anti-immigration views are shared by others, but said it found no evidence that the modern-day crusader network that Breivik claims to belong to, exists.

Norwegian police and government ministers have faced severe criticism for their actions before and during the attacks. The police response was marred by poor communication and technical mishaps. It took police more than an hour to reach Utoya, as a boat carrying the SWAT team was overloaded and stalled in the middle of the lake. Norway's only police helicopter wasn't used because its crew was on vacation.

Norway's justice minister and police chief both resigned in the aftermath and some critics have called on the prime minister to step down.

The judges took turns reading sections of the 90-page ruling, starting with the verdict and sentence, and then going over a chronology of the rampage, victim by victim, and describing their injuries.

Judge Arne Lyng noted that the fertilizer bomb that Breivik set off outside the government headquarters could have been even more devastating.

"It was pure luck that not many more were killed," Lyng said.

Since his guilt was not in question, Brevik's sanity was the key issue to be decided by the trial, with two psychiatric teams reaching opposite conclusions.

One gave Breivik a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, a severe mental illness that would preclude imprisonment, while the other found him narcissistic and dissocial - having a complete disregard for others - but criminally sane.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF A BOASTFUL KILLER

As a marathon trial neared its end, the world of Breivik shrank from a globally televised, clench-fisted victory salute to tales of plastic surgery on his nose, failed business deals and obsessive computer gaming.

Relentless questioning by prosecutors stripped down the anti-Islam militant from an almost larger-than-life monster who slaughtered 77 people to a rather mediocre, 33-year-old man who excelled in little other than being evil.

The 10-week trial that ended with a verdict on Friday that Breivik was not insane and must serve a maximum jail term was once mocked as over-the-top Nordic liberalism and a courtroom circus for his extreme far-right views. But the patient civility of Norwegian justice appears to have triumphed.

"I don't think people realised how small and pathetic he was, with that thin voice of his," said Mette Yvonne Larsen, one of the three lawyers in court representing victims.

It did not seem that way on the first day of his trial, when a smirking Breivik first walked into the packed courtroom with his far-right salute on live television. Breivik had even received over 100 letters of support from around Europe.

In a fresh suit, stylish tie and ironed shirt, he shook hands with prosecutors and lawyers. Norwegians appeared to treat him like they would a suspect in a household burglary.

Breivik then read page after page of his testimony, justifying his bombing of government offices and a gun rampage against the ruling Labour party's youth movement on the grounds that Europe was threatened by a multicultural "hell".

The judge politely tried to shut him up. "Just one more page," Breivik replied. The judge seemed powerless to stop him.

THE EDIFICE STARTS TO CRUMBLE

But there were signs even then that he would soon fall from his perch and his edifice would crumble.

"His hand was like a child's, limp," said Larsen, one of those who had shaken hands with him. "Not like a man's."

From that first day of trial, his decline and fall began.

The mild mannered prosecutor Inga Bejer Engh talked down to him like she would a child, gently probing how he returned to live with his mother after business deals failed, and his habit of wearing a face mask to avoid getting dirty.

She quietly insinuated, with an almost mischievous smile, that he had a nose job. Asked about his tendency to spend days playing computer games, he lost his composure.

"I know where you're going, you're ridiculing me," he said. "I will not be a part of that. I will turn my microphone off."

He often dug his own grave. He called himself a "caring person, talked about killing people who had "leftist looks" on their faces, and said women were inferior and belonged at home.

ICY CIVILITY

There was also the sheer horror, tales of how his victims were paralysed with fear who just stopped running and lay down before he shot them dead in the head, how he roared a joyous battle cry, looking angry and smiling simultaneously.

And how in police custody after the massacre, he appeared more concerned about blood loss from his cut finger and posed like a bodybuilder for a police photographer.

The icy civility of Norwegians appeared then to be breaking. A victim's relative threw a shoe at him. Tens of thousands of Norwegians spontaneously protested, singing a children's song that Breivik had said was Marxist propaganda.

After a few days, Breivik's time in the sun was over and it was the turn of the survivors of the mass shooting on Utoeya island to recount their tales. One by one they confronted him.

"Victims remembered the gunman being a monster, being two metres high," Geir Lippestad, Breivik's lawyer, told Reuters.

"The trial brought him down to just a human being with very bad thoughts. If you looked upon him as a monster, that would have taken away responsibility as society. The society has some responsibility about how this was possible."

Breivik seemed particularly uneasy one day when a young girl sat in the court to testify. She had put on a top without sleeves to show him, and the world, the now dangling limb that was once a healthy arm.

Breivik looked shocked, fidgety, his face flushed.

"On July 22, he was in control," said Eskil Pedersen, the leader of the Labour Party's youth wing and a massacre survivor, referring to the date of the attack last year.

"A lot of survivors have said that during the trial he has been brought down to mediocrity."

On the last day of the trial hearings, two months ago, he gave a final speech. Few remember the diatribe. Most international TV coverage had long gone. Some people yawned. Others just walked out of the court.

Breivik's days of fame were over.

"The first day everyone listened," said Larsen. "On the last day no one did. He looked kind of helpless when people walked out of the courtroom."

- AP and Reuters