Interviewing right-wing mass killer Anders Behring Breivik in jail was like meeting Hannibal Lecter, the cannibal in the horror film Silence of the Lambs, a psychologist said at his trial yesterday.

“Meeting Breivik was almost like meeting Hannibal,” Eirik Johannesen, who spent 26 hours speaking with the 33-year-old extremist in prison, told the Oslo district court.

Mr Johannesen was called by Mr Breivik’s defence to back its case that he was not crazy when he killed 77 people in Norway last year.

While Mr Breivik’s guilt is not in doubt, his sanity is at the heart of the ongoing trial in Oslo, where he stands charged with committing acts of terrorism in his twin attacks in and near the capital.

He bombed a government building in Oslo, killing eight people, then shot dead another 69, mainly teens, who were attending a summer camp held by the ruling Labour Party’s youth wing on the island of Utoeya.

He says his actions were to stop Norway falling victim to multiculturalism and a “Muslim invasion,” and wants to be officially declared sane in a bid to ensure that his ideology is not written off as the ravings of a lunatic.

Mr Johannesen told the court he was “completely convinced” that Mr Breivik was not psychotic, attributing his radical views to political extremism and not mental illness.

“In light of his ideology, I don’t think that he can be treated with therapy or with medicine,” Mr Johannesen said.

“He has created an identity to convince other right-wing extremists and fascists (to follow his example), an identity that doesn’t correspond to who he really is. But not in a psychotic way,” the psychologist added.

Experts have starkly different opinions about Mr Breivik’s sanity, with two court-ordered psychiatric evaluations reaching opposite conclusions.