OSLO — The Norwegian man who was charged Saturday with a pair of attacks in Norway that killed dozens of people left behind a detailed manifesto outlining his preparations and calling for a Christian civil war to defend Europe against the threat of Muslim domination, according to Norwegian and U.S. officials familiar with the investigation.
As stunned Norwegians grappled with the deadliest attack in the country since World War II, a portrait began to emerge of the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, 32. The police identified him as a right-wing fundamentalist Christian, while acquaintances described him as a gun-loving Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threats of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration.
“We are not sure whether he was alone or had help,” a police official, Roger Andresen, said Saturday at a televised news conference. “What we know is that he is right wing and a Christian fundamentalist.”
In the 1,500-page manifesto, posted on the Web hours before the attacks, Breivik recorded a day-by- day diary of months of planning for the attacks and claimed to be part of a small group that intends to “seize political and military control of Western European countries and implement a cultural conservative political agenda.”
He predicted a conflagration that would kill or injure more than 1 million “Marxists/multiculturalists” but added: “The time for dialogue is over. We gave peace a chance. The time for armed resistance has come.”
The manifesto was signed Andrew Berwick, an Anglicized version of his name. A former U.S. government official briefed on the case said investigators believed the manifesto was Breivik’s work.
The manifesto, titled “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” claims to explain “what your government, the academia and the media are hiding from you” and warns against “appeasement and anti-European thinking.”
Breivik also was believed to have posted a video Friday calling for Christian conservatives in Europe to rise up violently as a modern-day version of the Crusades-era Knights Templar to save Europe from Islamic totalitarianism. In its closing moments, the video depicts Breivik in military uniform, holding assault weapons.
YouTube removed the video Saturday.
Rarely has a plotter left so detailed an account of his activities. The document describes in detail his purchase of chemicals, his sometimes ham-handed experiments making explosives and his first successful test detonation of a bomb in a remote location June 13.
He intersperses the account of bomb-making with details of his television-watching, including the Eurovision music contest and the U.S. police drama “The Shield.” The manifesto ends with a chilling note: “I believe this will be my last entry. It is now Fri July 22nd, 12.51.” Indeed, the operation appeared to have been extremely well planned.
Besides the manifesto, Breivik left other hints of his motives.
A Facebook page and Twitter account were set up under his name days before the rampage, suggesting a conscious effort to construct a public persona and leave a legacy for others. The Facebook page cites philosophers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill.
His lone Twitter post, while not calling for violence, paraphrased Mill and suggested what he saw as his will to act: “One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.”
He had been a member of the right-wing Progress Party, which began as an anti-tax movement and has been stridently anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim.
Joran Kallmyr, a member of the party who is now Oslo’s vice mayor for transportation, said he met Breivik several times in 2002 and 2003 at local party meetings. “He was very quiet, almost a little bit shy,” Kallmyr said. “But he was a normal person with good behavior. He never shared any extreme thoughts or speech with us. There was absolutely no reason to expect that he could do something like this. We’re very shocked.”
Breivik quit the party in 2006, apparently disappointed by the party’s move toward the center.
His Internet posts also indicated contempt for the Conservative Party. He said it had given up a serious battle against multiculturalism, which he said was diluting the nation’s character.
But on Friday, he directed his firepower squarely at the center-left Labor Party, which leads the coalition government.
“Breivik feels that multiculturalism is destroying the society and that the enforcing authority is the prime minister and the Labor Party, the lead party of contemporary Norwegian politics,” said Anders Romarheim, a fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies. “No other political party has a political camp like this one.”
