Police face flak for series of blunders

Published on Tuesday 26 July 2011 19:20

WHEN Anders Breivik launched his assault on the young campers of Utoya Island he expected Norway's special forces to swoop and stop him any minute, but instead was given time to kill scores of people.

The officers of Oslo's elite Delta Force drove because police do not own a transport helicopter, then were rescued by a civilian boat when their own broke down as it tried to make the one-minute crossing to the island.

It took police more than 90 minutes to reach the gunman, who by then had mortally injured 68 people.

As Oslo's police force sounded an increasingly defensive note yesterday, international experts said Norway's government and security forces must learn stark lessons from a massacre made worse by a lackadaisical approach to planning for terror.

"Children were being slaughtered for an hour and a half and the police should have stopped it much sooner," said Mads Andenas, a law professor at the University of Oslo.

Survivors said they struggled initially to get their panicked phone calls heard and understood, because operators on emergency lines were rejecting calls not connected to the earlier bomb in Oslo.

When police finally took note that a gunman was shooting teens and 20-somethings on the island retreat, Breivik had already been hunting them down for half an hour. When officers eventually did arrive, Breivik immediately fell prone on the ground in surrender.

Police spokesman Johan Fredriksen rebuffed journalists' questions yesterday about the planning and equipment failures that gave Breivik extra minutes to kill.

He called the criticisms "unworthy". "We can take a lot, we're professional, but we are also human beings," he said.

Experts said in coming months Norway must take a hard, cold look at a system premised on the assumption that the country did not face a credible risk of terrorist attack, much less a back-to-back bombing and gun rampage.

Andrew Silke, director of terrorism studies at the University of East London, called the police response to the island attack "a bit Keystone Kops" because Norway's police were "just not used to dealing with something like this. The system was swamped."