Goal was to 'kill everybody' on Utoeya: Breivik
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Anders Behring Breivik told an Oslo court on Thursday he meant ‘to kill everybody’ in his Utoeya massacre, not just 69 people, and that he also wanted to behead a former prime minister.
"The goal was to kill everybody," the 33-year-old right-wing extremist told the court, adding he had first planned to capture former prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland and behead her on camera, before posting the video online.
"I stand for Utoeya and what I did, and would still do it again," he said, as survivors and victims' family members cried quietly and shook their heads in disgust.
Breivik is on trial for ‘acts of terror’ for his July 22 twin attacks, when he killed eight people with a van-bomb targeting buildings 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, for more than one hour he methodically shot at hundreds of people at a Labour Party youth summer camp, taking 69 lives, mostly teenagers.
There were 569 people on the island the day of the attacks, according to police.
But Breivik insisted he was ‘not a child murderer’, stressing he had thought there was a 16-year age limit to attend the camp and that he thought it was not ‘desirable’ to kill anyone under the age of 18.
He also stressed that ‘there were no better political targets in Norway that day’, and reiterated that most of the people he had killed had ‘leading positions’ within the youth group, which to him made them ‘category B’ traitors.
When asked what it was like to go on such a shooting rampage, Breivik acknowledged it was ‘extremely difficult to do... It goes against human nature in many ways’.
But, he insisted, Norwegian and European authorities were forcing him and other ‘militant nationalists’ to carry out ‘fire-arm based operations’ because they made it so difficult to get hold of explosives.
"We are forced to this because ... authorities have taken away our chances of using explosives," he said, adding he would have preferred setting off another bomb.
"It is easy to push a button… Much, much harder to do something so barbaric as a shooting operation," he told the court.
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