Norwegian shooting: Bomb was prelude to island massacre

THE carnage wrought by Anders Breivik began with a bomb in Oslo and culminated in a massacre of young people on the island of Utoya.

Police described it as an “Oklahoma City-type” bombing, targeting a government building, perpetrated by a home-grown assailant and using the same mix of fertiliser and fuel that blew up a building in the US city in 1995. The bomb was packed into a panel truck outside the building.

An agricultural supplier said Breivik bought six tonnes of fertiliser in the weeks before the explosion. But as police battled to deal with the effects of the bomb, a much more deadly attack was about to begin 20 miles north-west on the island of Utoya.

Police arrived on the island an hour and a half after the gunman opened fire, because they did not have quick access to a helicopter and could not find a boat to reach the scene just several hundred yards away.

Oslo police director Oeystein Maeland said later: “Could police have been faster? The answer is yes. If the boat hadn’t been over capacity, police would have been on Utoya faster.”

Mr Maeland added: “If it would have led to another and better result is nothing we know for sure, but we can’t rule it out. And it’s tough … to think that lives thereby would have been saved.”

Chilling accounts soon emerged of what happened at the camp.

A 15-year-old, Elise, heard gunshots but saw a police officer and thought she was safe. Then the man started shooting people in front of her.

“I saw many dead people,” she said. “He first shot people on the island. Afterwards, he started shooting people in the water.”

Dana Berzingi, 21, said several victims “had pretended they were dead to survive”.

But after shooting them with one gun, he blasted them in the head with a shotgun, he added.