The 32-year-old suspected of massacring at least 85 young people at a summer camp and setting off a bomb in downtown Oslo that killed at least seven is a mystery to investigators — a right-winger with anti-Muslim views but no known links to hardcore extremists.
“He just came out of nowhere,” a police official told The Associated Press.
Public broadcaster NRK and several other Norwegian media identified the suspect as Anders Behring Breivik, a blond and blue-eyed Norwegian who expressed right-wing and anti-Muslim views on the Internet.
News agency NTB said Breivik legally owned several firearms and belonged to a gun club. He ran an agricultural firm growing vegetables, an enterprise that could have helped him secure large amounts of fertilizer, a potential ingredient in bombs. But he didn't belong to any known factions in Norway's small and splintered extreme right movement, and had no criminal record except for some minor offences, the police official told AP.
“He hasn't been on our radar, which he would have been if was active in the neo-Nazi groups in Norway,” he said. “But he still could be inspired by their ideology.” Neo-Nazi groups carried out a series of murders and robberies in Scandinavia in the 1990s but have since kept a low profile.
“They have a lack of leadership. We have pretty much control of those groups,” said the police official.
National police chief Sveinung Sponheim told public broadcaster NRK that the gunman's Internet postings “suggest that he has some political traits directed toward the right, and anti-Muslim views, but whether that was a motivation for the actual act remains to be seen.”
A Facebook page under Breivik's name was taken down late Friday. Twitter account under his name had only one Tweet, on July 17— “One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.”
Police were interrogating the man, first at the scene of the shooting, and later at a police station in Oslo.
“It's strange that he didn't kill himself, like the guys that have carried out school shootings,” the police official told AP. He said the attacks appeared to be the work of a lone madman, without links to any international terrorist networks.
Investigators said the Norwegian carried out both attacks — the blast at the Prime Minister's Office in Oslo and the shooting spree at the left-wing Labor Party's youth camp — but didn't rule out that others were involved. But the police official said it wouldn't be impossible for one man to carry out the attacks on his own.
Screams, shots
“I heard screams. I heard people begging for their lives and I heard shots. He just blew them away. I was certain I was going to die,” he said.
Erik Kursetgjerde, an 18-year-old Labour Party youth member, described the fear and panic on Utoeya island when a gunman staged a methodical massacre on Friday — half an hour after organisers had told people at the youth camp about a bomb attack in Oslo. “People ran everywhere. They panicked and climbed into trees. People got trampled,” Kursetgjerde told Reuters outside a hotel in the town of Sundvollen, near the forested island.
