Breivik at the court: “I acted for the people”

the families of the victims leave the courtroom

OSLO – “I acted in the name of my people, my religion, my country. For this I ask for the acquittal”.  , the extremist author of the Oslo massacres and the Utoya massacre in which 77 people died did not change . During the last hearing of the trial against him that ended today in Norway, the confessed perpetrator continues to call himself sane, to clarify his reasons. And he asks the court to be acquitted: too much for the relatives of the victims who leave the room in controversy as soon as he takes the floor.

More than 30 people went out in protest when Breivik started explaining that he had planted the bomb that killed eight people in Oslo and killed 69 boys at the Utoya summer labor camp “in the name of my people, my religion and my country”. “He has the right to speak, but we have no duty to listen to him,” explains their spokesman. They left while the extremist motivated his actions in front of the court that struck Norway in the worst attempt in the history of the country in peacetime a year ago, on July 22nd. “We’ve heard it many times, there’s nothing new. We don’t care who it is and what it has to say.” They just want silence now.

Breivik, on the other hand, used all 45 minutes at his disposal for the final declarations, claiming that his attacks were necessary to defend the Norwegian ethnicity from multiculturalism and the Muslim invasion of the Scandinavian country. Pale, at times tired, he read from a written text, conceding that the attacks were “barbaric”, but justifying them as a response to the policies of the Labor party and to the risk that Norway may become “a multicultural hell”.

He insisted, like his lawyer, on being perfectly able to understand and to want. As evidence he said that only two out of 37 experts identified symptoms of mental disorders in him, and this would be proof of his sanity. The accusation points instead to mental infirmity and hospitalization in a psychiatric facility: on Thursday the prosecutor Svein Holden had stated that, even in the face of doubt about Breivik’s mental health, it would be worse to lock up a mental patient in a prison than to submit to treatment psychiatric a sane person.

The trial opened in April and now the sentence is expected on August 24th. And Oslo does not forget: the government has announced that two monuments will be built to commemorate the victims in the two places of the massacres, in the center of the Norwegian capital and on the island that hosted a young Labor camp.

(June 22, 2012)