Kept on a police leash, the man responsible for Norway’s worst post-war bloodshed showed no remorse when he took part in an eight-hour reconstruction of his island massacre, police said yesterday.
“He was not unaffected, but he showed no remorse for his actions,” police prosecutor Paal-Fredrik Hjort Kraby told reporters in Oslo a day after investigators brought Anders Behring Breivik to the scene of his July 22 rampage on the island of Utøeya.
He shot dead 69 people, many of them teenagers.
Just hours before the shooting spree, which he has confessed to, the 32-year-old rightwing extremist also bombed government offices in the Norwegian capital, killing eight other people.
Mr Hjort Kraby said Saturday’s site visit had been vital to the case.
“All research shows that it helps the memory to come back to the scene of the crime. (Mr Behring Breivik) provided us with a lot of new information which we didn’t have before, despite 50 hours of (previous) interrogation,” the police prosecutor said.
“We feel we have a fairly good overview of how everyone died or was shot now, even though there are still details to fill in,” he said, adding some of the victims who died had drowned trying to swim for safety.
Mr Behring Breivik was taken to the island some 40 kilometres from Oslo, first by car and then by the same boat he used on the day of the attack.
The trip on Saturday afternoon was made under heavy security, with Mr Behring Breivik shackled on the boat and kept on “a leash” while on the island, police said.
The self-confessed killer, his lawyer Geir Lippestad and all the police officers wore bullet-proof vests, officials said, and media reported that police helicopters had circled above amid fears of an attempted revenge attack.
Mr Hjort Kraby said that Mr Behring Breivik had clearly been “taken back to that day”, when he attacked a summer camp hosted by the ruling Labour Party’s youth wing.
“He remembered new things,” he said, adding there were no major inconsistencies in his account although “sometimes he would walk in the wrong direction and then correct himself”.
“Everything he said was video filmed and recorded” and would be used as evidence in the case, Mr Horst Kraby added.