At 3:26 pm on July 22, 2011, an explosion shattered the peace in the Norwegian capital of Oslo. The blast, which was centred just outside the government offices of Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, killed eight people and injured dozens more. Had the bombing occurred at another time of the year, the casualty list likely would have been much longer; because many Norwegians take their vacations at the end of July, this unofficial “common holiday” meant that many public offices in the area of the blast were largely empty on the afternoon of the attack. As events continued to unfold throughout the day, Norwegians would take little comfort from the fact that the deadliest attacks on Norway since World War II could have been far worse.
Police officials determined that the explosion had been caused by a car bomb, and they drew parallels to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 in the U.S. The Norwegian military established a cordon around downtown Oslo. Fearing the detonation of additional devices, officials warned residents to remain in their homes. As the rescue and recovery effort continued in Oslo, police received reports of gunshots on the resort island of Utøya, some 40 km (25 mi) to the northwest.
About 5:00 pm, roughly an hour and a half after the bomb detonated in Oslo, a man dressed as a police officer took a ferry from the mainland to the island of Utøya. Stating that he was performing a security check in connection with the bombing, he gained access to a youth camp hosted by the Norwegian Labour Party. At 5:26 pm police began to receive reports of gunfire on the island. Armed with a semiautomatic rifle and pistol, the gunman spent the next hour methodically targeting the roughly 600 young people at the camp. Many of the campers were teenagers—and one survivor was just 10 years old—and the gunman used his police disguise to lure some of his victims closer with the promise of rescue. A shortage of transport helicopters delayed the law-enforcement response, and by the time police arrived on the island at 6:25 pm, 69 people were dead or dying. Police apprehended the suspected gunman, Anders Behring Breivik, minutes later without incident. The combined death toll of the bombing and shooting ultimately reached 77, and the overwhelming majority of the dead were between 14 and 19 years old.
Breivik, the 32-year-old Norwegian accused of having executed the two attacks, had no previous criminal record. He was active on neo-Nazi and anti-Islamic Web sites; however, he had not demonstrated a propensity for violent rhetoric. After his arrest a 1,500-page manifesto attributed to “Andrew Berwick,” an Anglicization of Breivik’s name, was found online. Titled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, the tract borrowed heavily from the antitechnology manifesto issued by Ted Kaczynski (the so-called Unabomber, who conducted a 17-year bombing campaign in the United States), and it was filled with anti-Islamic language and imagery that evoked the Crusades and the Templar religious military order. It also detailed the day-to-day preparations that Breivik had made prior to the attacks. He spent several years amassing the funds to finance what he called his “martyrdom operation,” and he leased a secluded farmhouse in eastern Norway, which made his purchase of several tons of fertilizer in the weeks prior to the blast look less suspicious. Ammonium nitrate fertilizer can be combined with fuel oil to create a powerful improvised explosive device.
Breivik stated that the Labour Party had failed to prevent the encroachment of “cultural Marxism” (a pejorative term for multiculturalism) and a “Muslim takeover,” so he sought to precipitate an armed revolt. His attack on the Labour Party youth camp was designed to limit the party’s ability to recruit in the future, and he intended to target former Labour prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who delivered a speech at Utøya just hours before the massacre. Although Breivik admitted to both the bombing in Oslo and the shootings at Utøya, he pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges that were filed against him. In November 2011 court-appointed psychiatrists concluded that Breivik suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Had he been deemed mentally fit for trial, Breivik could have been sentenced to a maximum of 30 years in prison. With an insanity diagnosis, however, he faced the possibility of spending the rest of his life in psychiatric care.