OSLO — The gunman had already spared him once. It wasn’t going to happen again.
Minutes before, Adrian Pracon had been trying to swim to safety when the killer pointed his weapon. “Please, no, please!” Pracon screamed. No bullet came. Now, sprawled facedown on a half-submerged rock, trying to play dead, the 21-year-old sensed the shooter standing almost directly above him. He could feel the heat of the weapon. As the gunman fired at youths lying on the island’s shore, Pracon kept still — even when a shot grazed his shoulder. That apparently convinced the attacker that Pracon was dead and to move on.
“It was as though he had done this kind of thing before, as if going around and shooting people was totally normal,” Pracon told Norway’s Aftenposten newspaper. “He said, ‘You’re all going to die.’ ”
Earlier Friday, the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, posted a day-by-day Web 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.”
Authorities said Saturday the death toll reached 89 from the shootings and an earlier bombing in Oslo, with 82 victims — mostly young people — in the rampage at a youth camp of the ruling Labor Party on Utoya Island. Four people were still missing.
Police said Breivik, 32, described as a Christian fundamentalist with extreme right-wing views, put up no resistance when officers finally arrived on Utoya to apprehend him. He has admitted firing on hundreds of people on the island outside Oslo, authorities said.
A defense lawyer, Geir Lippestad, told TV2 news Saturday that Breivik “said that he believed the actions were atrocious, but that in his head they were necessary.”
Lippestad said his client was willing to explain himself at a court hearing Monday. The court will decide whether to hold him until his trial.
“He has confessed to the factual circumstances,” Lippestad told public broadcaster NRK. “He’s said some things about that, but I don’t want to talk about it now.”
Suspect faces 21 years
If convicted on the terrorism charges, he would face a maximum of 21 years in jail, police said.
Authorities have not given a motive for the attacks, but both were in areas connected to the Labor Party, which leads the coalition government.
Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg described the tragedy as peacetime Norway’s deadliest day.
“This is beyond comprehension. It’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare for those who have been killed, for their mothers and fathers, family and friends,” Stoltenberg said Saturday.
The attacks raised questions about whether the Norwegian security authorities, concentrating on threats of Islamic terrorism, had overlooked the threat from the anti-Islamic right.
“This is the Norwegian equivalent to Timothy McVeigh,” the right-wing American who blew up a government building in Oklahoma City in 1995, said Marcus Buck, a political scientist at the University of Tromso in northern Norway. “This is right-wing domestic terrorism, and the big question is to what extent Norwegian agencies have diverted their attention from what they knew decades ago was the biggest threat” and instead focused on threats from militant Islamist groups.
The unclassified versions of the last three reports by the Norwegian Police Security Service assessing the threats to the country all played down the threat posed by right-wing and nationalist extremists. Instead, the reports emphasized the dangers of radical Islam, groups opposed to Norway’s participation in NATO operations in Afghanistan and now Libya, economic espionage against the country’s resources and technology assets and potential threats to Norwegian dignitaries.
Police said Saturday that the massacre on the island went on, incredibly, for more than an hour.
Terrified youths were hunted down as they cowered inside bathrooms, scrambled through bushes on the heavily wooded island and dived into the icy waters to try to escape.
With a sniper’s calm, the gunman picked them off on land and in the water, using a handgun and an automatic weapon.
Even more frightening, he was dressed in a police uniform, which made some of the desperate survivors uncertain whether help or more hell had come when the real officers showed up.
“Who could we trust?” a survivor named Khamshajiny Gunaratnam wrote on her blog.
Breivik also is suspected of setting off a car bomb in downtown Oslo. An agricultural cooperative reported Saturday that Breivik had ordered 6 metric tons of artificial fertilizer to be taken to his farmhouse in Asta, a sparsely populated community about 2 1/2 hours north of Oslo, at the beginning of May.
Large fertilizer order
Because he owned a farm, the purchase, though large, seemed legitimate, authorities said. But such fertilizer can also be used to make explosives, as was the case in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
About 4 to 5 metric tons were found at Breivik’s farmhouse, the Oslo deputy police chief, Sveinung Sponheim, said.
Investigators are trying to determine whether other bombs might be planted elsewhere.
Stoltenberg said government workers were among the dead in the heavily damaged buildings in downtown Oslo. The remains of some victims were not yet recovered, police said.
Although the huge explosion was undoubtedly meant to kill on a large scale, it also turned out to be a diversion from — and a setup for — the real slaughter to come on Utoya.
Simen Mortensen, a volunteer for the summer camp, was stationed on the mainland side of the ferry service to Utoya.
He told the Verdens Gang newspaper that a man wearing a police uniform and a bulletproof vest pulled up in a silver vehicle. The man was armed with a pistol and an automatic weapon with a telescopic lens.
“He gets out of the car and shows identification. Says he’s been sent to check on security, that this is routine, in connection with the terrorist attack,” Mortensen said. “Everything looks fine, and a boat is called to ferry him over to Utoya.
“After a few minutes, we hear shooting.”
Once on the island, the tall, blond-haired man apparently beckoned unsuspecting campers over to him, telling them he wanted to talk about the explosion they had heard about in Oslo.
Camp knew of blast
News of the blast already had reached Utoya; the retreat’s leaders had called a meeting about it so that attendees could call their families to make sure they were all right, Gunaratnam wrote in her blog.
Then the gunman drew his weapons and opened fire. Campers screamed and scattered.
“The first thing the crazy man did was shoot the first nice-looking girl he saw,” Marius Helander Roset told VG Nett, the online news site of Verdens Gang. Roset fled into the woods and hid behind a rock.
“We thought life was over while we ran. Many phoned home to give their parents a final message,” camper Alexander Stavdal, 23, told VG Nett.
Many of those who tried to swim to safety had to make the agonizing choice to turn back, their clothes too heavy for them to continue or the distance to the mainland, about 500 yards, too far for them to cross.
Hiding in a cave
Roset swam back to shore and found a cave to hide in with others.
“The shooter was standing right near us and threw rocks into the water to lure us out,” he said.
Disturbingly, Roset and others say that the killer had an accomplice, a dark-haired man who was similarly armed but did not wear a police uniform.
Sponheim, the deputy police chief, said Saturday that investigators were looking into all possibilities.
Police are now coming under question for how long they took to respond to the rampage on Utoya.
Sissel Hammer, the chief of police for the district covering Utoya, released a chronology late Saturday showing that special forces from Oslo took nearly 45 minutes to reach the island after her district called them for help.
By then, an hour had elapsed since the first report had come in of shooting on the island.
Asked why a helicopter wasn’t used, Sponheim said police had considered the option but rejected it because requisitioning the copter would take longer than the journey by road.
When police arrived on the island, dozens of young people were already dying or dead. Officers shouted at the gunman to freeze and lay down his weapons; he did so without resistance and without police firing a shot, bringing a mind-boggling massacre to a strangely meek end.
Fears lingered
Officers began rounding up trembling campers to assure them that they were now safe. One attendee told of being advised to keep his eyes down, “but it was impossible not to see that there were dead people all around us on all sides.”
Gunaratnam, the blogger, said she was too numb to cry.
“We don’t deserve to die,” she wrote. “We’re just normal youth. We participate in politics. We want to make the world a better place. I missed the part where WE became the bad guys.”
The Associated Press and The New York Times contributed to this report.
Two hours of terror
3:30 p.m. Friday: Three days into their annual summer camp on Utoya Island, about 600 Labor Party youth activists from all across Norway hear the first vague news of a bombing in the capital, Oslo, about 20 miles away.
4:30 p.m.: As footage of destruction and news of deaths confirm the huge scale of the Oslo explosion, Utoya’s campers gather in worried huddles and talk quietly next to tents, in the cafeteria, at fir-lined coves and in the island’s tiny harbor. They touch foreheads while watching news on their smartphones. Those from Oslo call parents and siblings to confirm that they’re all right.
5 p.m.: Amid the coming and going of several small boats, a lone man dressed as a police officer arrives. The man — armed, unusually, with two firearms visible on his hip and shoulder — says he’s there to boost security. Then, witnesses say, he raises his assault rifle and opens fire with bursts of automatic fire. His hunt of defenseless left-wing political activists has begun.
5:15 p.m.: Witnesses say the gunman enters a village of tents, the residential heart of the retreat, and spots desperate individuals hoping he’ll spare them if they run back inside their shelters. But the killer is seen working his way tent by tent, shooting many point-blank, one by one.
5:25 p.m.: Oslo Labor activist Prableen Kaur, who described the scene on her blog the next day, says a burst of gunfire close to a building triggers panic, and everyone leaps out of a window. Several suffer injuries. The shooter doesn’t pursue them at first.
Kaur takes cover behind a low brick wall, calls her mother on her cellphone and sends a text to her father. “I prayed, prayed, prayed,” Kaur wrote. “I hope that God saw me.”
5:30 p.m.: The gunman picks off campers who run from their hiding spots as he draws near. Many find themselves at the shoreline with only one apparent escape route — the water. Kaur says the gunman tries to draw out those hiding near the brick wall, shouting, “I’m from the police!” Campers shout back, “Prove it!” He shoots at those who move. Kaur lies still, on the legs of a teenage girl covered in blood.
5:38 p.m.: Police say an armed SWAT team is deployed from Oslo. They drive rather than take a helicopter, police say, because the copter would take too long to prepare for flight.
5:45 p.m.: At another camp site on the mainland near Utoya Island, camp owner Brede Johbraaten and others rally several small craft to join a local flotilla converging on the island from several points, including another island to the north. They pluck both flailing swimmers and lifeless bodies from the surface.
Amid the chaos, the arriving police SWAT team complains that no boats have remained on shore, compounding the delay.
6 p.m.: Witnesses lying low behind rocks, aware that the “policeman” is really the threat, watch helplessly as four campers run to the officer for help and are each killed with shots to the head. 6:20 p.m.: Police say the SWAT team finally reaches the island and fans out, still unaware of how many gunmen they’re trying to find.
6:35 p.m.: Police say they find the gunman and order him to lay down his weapons. He complies and is arrested.
7 p.m.: The private rescue flotilla continues to circle the island in search of survivors. The boats come closer now that the shooting has stopped. Kaur is scooped from the water. But many campers fear leaving their hiding spots.
The Associated Press
