The gunman behind Norway’s massacres told a court yesterday he had meant to kill the entire government and said he used meditation, video shooting games and steroids to prepare for the slaughter.
Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered 77 people last July, also said he had planned a far greater bloodbath with three, not one, car bombs and a death toll of several hundred people when he went on his rampage.
The 33-year-old far-right extremist revealed he practised a form of Japanese meditation daily since 2006 to help block out his emotions during the attacks, and used testosterone from April last year, and anabolic steroids on the day of the attacks.
During his killing spree, he first blew up a van filled with 950 kilograms of explosives at the foot of the tower housing the offices of Labour Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who was not present at the time. He then travelled to Utoeya island where, dressed as a police officer, he methodically shot for over an hour at hundreds of people at a Labour Party youth summer camp, taking 69 lives.
There were 569 people on the island that day, and Mr Breivik testified that he would have liked to kill them all – including the beheading of former premier Gro Harlem Brundtland and posting a video of her execution on the internet.
He said that on heading to Utoeya, “the goal was to kill everybody”.
“I stand for Utoeya and what I did, and would still do it again,” he said.
He insisted he was “not a child murderer”, and described the Utoeya victims as “category B” traitors because they held “leading positions” within the Labour party youth movement. Breivik also mentioned the game “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare”, which he said he had used as actual training for the shooting spree.
“It is a war simulator. It gives you an impression of how target systems work,” he explained.
Calm and cooperative during questioning, Breivik smiled several times while discussing target shooting techniques. When confronted about his smiles by prosecutor Svein Holden, he acknowledged the survivors and victims’ families watching were probably reacting “in a natural way, with horror and disgust”.
Breivik, charged with “acts of terror”, has entered a plea of not guilty, saying his actions were “cruel but necessary”.