'Sane' Norwegian killer Breivik gets max sentence of 21 years
By Delords - Friday, August 24, 2012
Mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, makes a salute after arrives at the court room in a courthouse in Oslo Friday Aug. 24, 2012 . Breivik, who admitted killing 77 people in Norway last year, declared sane and sentenced to prison for bomb and gun attacks.
Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik was jailed for a maximum term on Friday when judges declared him sane enough to answer for the murder of 77 people last year, drawing a smirk of triumph from the self-styled warrior against Islam.
An unrepentant Breivik, 33, gave
the Oslo court a stiff-armed, clench-fisted salute before being handed
the steepest possible penalty, 21 years. His release, however, can be
put off indefinitely should he still pose a threat to a liberal society
left traumatized by his bomb and shooting rampage last July.
Justifying blasting a government
building and gunning down dozens of teenagers at a summer camp as a
service to a nation threatened by immigration, he had said only
acquittal or death would be worthy outcomes. But his biggest concern was
being declared insane, a fate he said would be "worse than death."
[Related: Q&A about the Breivik trial] Judge Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen dismissed a prosecution call for her to label Breivik mad, a ruling that would have seen him confined indefinitely to psychiatric care rather than prison.
Some survivors of the slaughter at the Labour party youth camp on Utoeya island, and much of the Norwegian public, had been keen to see Breivik held clearly responsible for his actions - and to avoid the insanity verdict that would have prompted him to demand lengthy and traumatic appeals hearings.
For many Norwegians, still shocked by their bloodiest day since World War Two, the details were academic, however.
"He is getting what he
deserves," said Alexandra Peltre, 18, whom Breivik shot in the thigh on
Utoeya. "This is karma striking back at him. I do not care if he is
insane or not, as long as he gets the punishment that he deserves."
Breivik, who had surrendered to
police on the island without a fight, admitted blowing up the Oslo
government headquarters with a fertilizer bomb, killing eight, on
Friday, July 22, 2011, then shooting 69 at the ruling party's summer
youth camp.
Dressed in a black suit with a
tie and still sporting the blond, under-chin beard familiar from the 10
weeks of hearings that ended in June, Breivik smirked when he entered
the courtroom and smiled again as the judge read out the verdict.
He will not appeal, his lawyer
said. "He will accept this verdict," Geir Lippestad told Reuters. During
the trial Breivik said: "I would do it again" - an attitude which, if
maintained, would prevent his being released at the end of his sentence.
BEREAVED SATISFIED
A lawyer for some victims and their families said they, too, were
satisfied: "I am pleased, although that's not really the right word, and
relieved. This is what we hoped for," said Mette Yvonne Larsen, who
represented some of those affected in court."This is justice served and they are happy it's over and will never have to see him again."
The killings shook the nation of
five million which had prided itself as a safe haven from much of the
world's troubles, raising questions about the prevalence of far-right
views in a country where oil wealth has attracted rising immigration.
But the trial, which some had
dreaded Breivik might turn into a "circus" of hatred, has been hailed as
a model of dispassionate Scandinavian justice that offered closure to
the grieving; and Norwegians refused to let fear drive them to curb
their easy-going daily lives with cumbersome security measures.
Breivik will now be kept in
isolation inside Ila Prison on the outskirts of Oslo inside relatively
spacious quarters that include a separate exercise room, a computer and a
television.
His diatribes against
centre-left governments' acceptance of Muslim immigration, spread over
the Internet, and aired on television during the trial, drew support
from a militant few in Europe. But even most of the hardest right-wing
fringe groups kept their distance from the self-confessed mass killer.
Police found his claims to
belong to a shadowy European network he called the Knights Templar, a
nod to the mediaeval Crusader order, were probably the imaginings of an
angry loner.
Norway's anti-immigration
Progress Party, which Breivik had once briefly joined, suffered in
municipal elections after the massacre, forcing the second biggest party
in parliament to tone down its rhetoric. Opinion poll support for
liberal immigration policies even grew and the attack brought many young
people, now often referred to as the Utoeya generation, into politics.
Although his victims were mostly teenagers, with some as young as 14, he rejected being called a child murderer, arguing that his victims were brainwashed "cultural Marxists" whose political activism would adulterate pure Norwegian blood.
He stalked his victims dressed
as a policeman, tricking them into thinking he was the help sent from
the shore after the initial attack. He then shot them from close range
before finishing them with a shot to the head.
"I stand by what I have done and I would still do it again." he said during his court testimony.
Breivik, a high school dropout
who once spent an entire year devoting himself to computer games,
suffered troubles from early childhood and a psychiatric evaluation
proposed removing him from his family, a verdict social workers finally
rejected.
Some Norwegians now believe their country must draw on the experience to debate issues like immigration, and a commission investigating the attack also concluded the country need radical changes, including gun controls and more sweeping police powers.
Still, very little has changed over the past year; ministers still walk the streets of Oslo without bodyguards and private cars can drive right up to the parliament building.
"This attack has not in any way
succeeded in redefining our liberal democracy," said Oslo University
philosophy professor Lars Fredrik Svendsen. "The Norwegian judicial
system has shown itself as rock solid during this trial."
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