One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (61 page)

He drew breath.

‘I acted on the principle of necessity on behalf of my people, my religion, my city and my country. I therefore demand to be acquitted of these charges. Those were the thirteen pages I had prepared.’

*   *   *

‘What is your own relationship with Christianity?’ asked the public advocate Siv Hallgren the following day. The lawyer, who had herself been a teenage mother,
represented several of the bereaved relatives.

‘Well, I’m a militant Christian and not particularly religious. But I’m a
bit
religious. We want a Christian cultural heritage, Christian religious instruction in schools and a Christian framework for Europe.’

‘But what about you personally? Do you profess the Christian faith? Do you believe in the resurrection?’

‘I’m a Christian, I believe in
God. I’m a
bit
religious, but not
that
religious.’

‘Have you read the Bible?’

‘Of course. I used to, back when we were taught about Christianity in school. Before it was abolished by the Labour Party.’

Hallgren asked him to define Norwegian culture. The one he had killed for, in order to preserve it.

‘You could … yes, you could say that the very heart of Norwegian culture is the Norwegian
ethnic group.’

He hesitated for a moment, reflected and found the answer: ‘Everything that’s in Norway, from door handles to designs to beer labels to habits. It’s all culture. Phrases, ways of addressing people. Absolutely everything is culture.’

Said Breivik.

The Heart of the Matter

At the centre of the court case there was a beating heart.

The dead.

The murders had almost been pushed into the background by the discussions of the perpetrator’s psyche and ideas in the run-up to the trial. But it was the murders he was to be punished for, not the ideas.

Svein Holden and Inga Bejer Engh had been given responsibility for planning the trial the previous
autumn. They were both young parents with a couple of children each and lived ordinary, privileged Norwegian lives. Holden went straight from leading a press conference about the first psychiatric report to the hospital for the birth of his second child.

The two public prosecutors spent a lot of time talking to the bereaved relatives and survivors as they planned the proceedings, fetched their
children from nursery, prepared the trial, changed nappies, read interview transcripts, sang lullabies. Their meetings with other mothers and fathers only a few years older than them had a profound effect. Some were angry, others were weighed down by sorrow. Something was broken in all of them. The public prosecutors encountered both aggression and the story of my son. My daughter. Our child.

It was important both to retain the emotions and to keep them out of it. This was how the public prosecutors were reasoning as they asked themselves how best to set the parameters for the trial.

Svein Holden made a list:

Good contact with those affected.

Good procedures for the police.

Good overview of the trial.

Treat it like any other criminal case.

But it was not like any other criminal
case. The scale was so large. Seventy-seven murders.

The Director of Public Prosecution had insisted that every single murder must be investigated. Time and place were to be established, when and how. Those who had lost their loved ones needed as much detail as possible; it was said to help in the healing process.

The police had learned from the response to the bombings in Madrid and London.
In those trials, the cause and time of death were not established for each person, their individual fates were not treated as separate events by the court. They were simply referred to as victims of a terrorist attack.

The investigations must also be as thorough as possible so that they would stand up to potential conspiracy theories that might emerge in years to come.

Many wanted to make their
mark on the trial. A campaign had started, pressing for all those who had been on Utøya and all those who had been in the government quarter to be named as victims in the charges. They had all been subjected to attempted murder, after all. In a standard trial, attempted murder would always be part of the charge.

The general rule was that if you were named in the charge, you also had to be called
as a witness. It would exceed all time scales.

So where would they draw the line?

The two prosecutors were sitting in the office of the Director of Public Prosecution, counting. How many people were hit by projectiles in the government quarter? How many were hit by bullets on Utøya?

They ascertained the numbers and used that as the basis of who would be named in the charge. Those physically
hit by metal or lead. In the government quarter there were nine, in addition to the eight who were killed. On Utøya there were thirty-three, on top of the sixty-nine killed.

The Director of Public Prosecutions made a few calculations; the timescale of the trial had already been established. It was to last ten weeks. Yes, it would work. They could all be called in as witnesses. There would be
just enough time for that within the period they had at their disposal.

But how many had suffered direct harm in the terrorist attack?

With regard to the government quarter, they decided to write that ‘an additional two hundred people were physically injured by the explosion’. That included cuts, fractures and hearing damage. As for Utøya, they wanted to focus on the trauma suffered by many
of the youngsters as a result of seeing people they knew murdered, of losing their friends.

No one was to be forgotten, even if they were not named.

*   *   *

In a standard murder trial, pictures of the dead person are shown on a screen in the courtroom. These are both general shots showing where the victim was found and close-ups documenting the cause of death.

Svein Holden took the view
that the same should happen in the 22 July case. ‘That’s what you do in a criminal case,’ said Holden. ‘You show pictures. Business as usual.’ The pathologists agreed.

Bejer Engh was more sceptical. She was afraid it would be too violent. Again the public prosecutors sought the advice of the support group. The bereaved did not want any pictures at all. It would be too awful. In the government
quarter some of the bodies were so badly damaged that only a few body parts remained. On Utøya, skulls were shattered, the victims smeared with blood and brains. The first set of pictures had been taken by the crime technicians on the path, in the woods, by the water’s edge or on the floor in the café. Later, when the dead underwent autopsies, they were photographed once more, their bodies cleaned
of blood so that the gunshot wounds were more evident. These were the two sets of pictures usually shown to a court.

The views of the next of kin persuaded Holden. The public prosecutors decided they would put the photographic evidence in folders, which would only be given to members of the court.

*   *   *

Inger Bejer Engh wondered how she would cope with the pictures herself. Should she just
take a quick glance when she had to? Or should she keep looking at them until she grew immune?

All the bodies of those shot and killed on Utøya had been X-rayed. A three-dimensional picture was generated of each one. These pictures revealed where every bullet fragment had expanded in the tissue. One could detect the bullet in a heart, splinters scattered through a brain, metal that had sliced
carotid arteries or entered spines. One could track the path of every bullet, to find out which of them was the lethal one.

The medical experts were preoccupied with showing the injuries as clearly as possible and wanted to display the three-dimensional images of the victims in court.

‘We can’t show their bodies on a screen!’ objected Bejer Engh.

Everything that was shown in room 250 would
be broadcast to other courtrooms and there was no guarantee there would not be someone there with an iPhone, taking pictures.

‘What shall we do then, use drawings?’ asked Holden.

In conversations with the pathologists, Holden came up with the idea of a dummy they could point to. They would need a gender-neutral dummy and a pointer.

All right. They would order a dummy.

But where was it to be
positioned? On the floor? On a stand of some kind? On a turntable? The dummy had to represent seventy-seven different people. It was important that it be handled in a dignified way.

And what should the dummy look like? What colour would its skin be?

It could not be white. How would the parents of the non-white victims react?

Nor could it be black; that would create the wrong impression too.

They reached a decision.

The dummy would be grey.

*   *   *

It was 8 May. The time was eleven a.m. The tables in the cafeteria, a short distance from room 250, were emptying because all who had been sitting there were heading back to the courtroom. In the recess the cafeteria had been taken over by a loud group of people. They sat a little closer to each other than the canteen users normally
did, laughed rather more often and made more noise. They all had the same shade of hair, of skin, darker than most of those in the foyer area, and there were several generations of them together. They had ordered coffee and drunk water. They were family. They were going in for Bano.

They were Kurds, from Norway, Sweden and Iraq. Few of Bano’s closest relations had been able to get visas for her
funeral; their applications could not be processed in time. Bano was buried the day after she was identified. She was the first Muslim ever to be laid to rest on Nesodden. A female priest officiated in the church and an imam spoke at the burial.

The court case had been planned long in advance. Now her family were here for her.

Since the start of May, the court had been going through twelve autopsy
reports a day. In addition to the submission of evidence about the injuries, every victim was remembered with a picture and a text chosen by the bereaved. It gave this first week in May a sense of ceremony. On this particular day, the court had reached Utøya victim number 31.

Places had been reserved for the relatives. An interpreter sat ready in the booth. Bayan tightly held the hand of Mustafa,
who was sitting beside her.

The judge asked Gøran Dyvesveen, the forensic technician from Kripos, to speak slowly and clearly so the interpreter would not miss anything. He promised to do so. It was eleven minutes past eleven.

‘Bano Rashid was on Lovers’ Path. She died of gunshot wounds to the head,’ said Dyvesveen. Three of the judges swung round to the shelves behind them to find the file
with the picture of Bano. They could see her in several pictures in the file, lying on her side on the undulating path. They could see the general view of the murder victims lying close, close together, almost on top of each other. In one of the pictures, the ten were covered by woollen blankets. It made them look like a big lump on the path. It seemed they had come together for protection, there
in their final moments.

Bano’s uncle, Bayan’s brother, was sitting on his sister’s other side and had also gripped hold of her hand. Soon the whole row was holding hands. Sitting in front of the adults were Lara and Ali, among their cousins. They too were squeezing each other’s hands.

On the wall of the courtroom was a screen, on which a picture of the path was shown – the scene of the killings,
but without the victims. A red dot indicated where Bano had been found.

‘The dot shows where her head was,’ said the forensic technician.

Then his medical colleague Åshild Vege went over to the dummy, which was covered in a velvety kind of material. Grey velvet.

Vege went through the injuries inflicted on Bano. ‘Bano died of gunshot wounds to the head. These caused instantaneous loss of consciousness
and swift death.’

The same information was displayed on the screen on the wall. The eighteen-year-old’s name and where the bullets had hit her.

Holden was a stickler for aesthetic impression in the courtroom. He wanted all the posters, all the graphs, everything that the forensic technicians, the expert witnesses and the pathologists brought with them to be linguistically correct and to be proofread
one last time before they were shown. Holden insisted that everything be in the same black type in a font offering as little distraction as possible: Times New Roman.

Everything in court was to look neat and tidy.

The caption describing Bano’s gunshot wounds was replaced by two pictures of her. Her parents had found it hard to decide which picture to send to the court when they were asked, so
they sent two. One showed a smiling Bano in her
bunad
from Trysil. The other showed a smiling Bano in traditional Kurdish costume.

‘Bano was born in the realm of
A Thousand and One Nights
,’ began her public advocate. ‘When Bano was seven, she fled the war in Iraq with her family. Everyone who knew her was sure she was really going to make something of her life…’

The lawyer’s voice shook. Mette
Yvonnne Larsen knew Bano well, had known her for many years, because her daughter was Bano’s classmate and one of her closest friends. She read a short statement about the things that had engaged and enthused Bano and said she had been posthumously elected to the local council in Nesodden.

It was nineteen minutes past eleven. It had taken eight minutes.

The court moved on to Anders Kristiansen.
Who was holding a protective arm round Bano when she died.

He was the next red dot on the path.

*   *   *

‘Now we move to the steep slope down to the water. The cliff area. Five died there,’ said Gøran Dyvesveen from Kripos, the day after pointing out Bano, Anders and the others who were killed on the path.

‘All five were transported over to the mainland and were not in their place/site of
death when the crime scene investigation started.’

He orientated them on the general map, which was enlarged on the wall-mounted screen. ‘The steep slope lay just to the south of Lover’s Path,’ he said, pointing. ‘This is where we saw the ten lying yesterday. This slope will be the focus of our attention now.’