Anders Behring Breivik: the boy next door turned serial killer

“I have had a privileged upbringing with responsible and intelligent
people around me,” he wrote in a 1,500-page manifesto he published just
before the massacre.

Raised by his mother in a middle-class family, he said he never had financial
problems and has only one gripe: “I had way too much freedom though if
anything.”

But from a young age, child welfare services were concerned that he may not
have been receiving proper care.

“Anders has become a contact adverse, somewhat anxious, passive child
… with a feigned, disarming smile,” a psychologist wrote when he was
just four.

“Ideally he should be placed with a stable foster family,” the
expert wrote in a report revealed by Norwegian media.

But that never happened. Around the same time, Anders’ father failed in his
bid to obtain custody of his son.

After this episode, Anders Behring Breivik appeared to have a typical
childhood with no major problems.

“When he was younger, he was an ordinary boy but not very communicative.
He was not interested in politics at the time,” his father told
Norwegian media.

The diplomat cut off all contact with his son when he was around 15,
supposedly when Anders, during a hip-hop phase, was caught drawing graffiti
tags.

His old friends describe him as a discreet person, who sometimes had a hard
time finding his place in the world – not at all the natural leader he
presents himself to be.

He quit high school at age 18 without getting his diploma, supposedly to
undertake a career in politics.

In 1999 he joined the populist right-wing, anti-immigration Progress Party and
was active with its local youth branch.

He left the party in 2006, writing later on an internet forum that he felt the
party was too open to “multicultural demands” and “the
suicidal ideas of humanism”.

While his criticism of Islam, multiculturalism and Marxism are all over the
Internet Breivik considered himself “a laid-back type and quite
tolerant on most issues”.

“Due to the fact that I have been exposed to decades of multicultural
indoctrination I feel a need to emphasise that I am not in fact a racist and
never have been,” he wrote.

“Being a skinhead was never an option for me. Their dress codes and
taste of music was unappealing and I thought they were too extreme,” he
wrote, adding that he had “dozens of non-Norwegian friends during my
younger years”.

On his Facebook profile, Breivik describes himself as “conservative”,
“Christian”, and interested in hunting and video games like “World
of Warcraft” and “Modern Warfare 2”, which, he later
revealed, he used to train for his deadly rampage.

On July 22 last year, he spent more than an hour methodically killing 69
people, most of them adolescents, on the island of Utoya, in what is
believed to be the deadliest shooting ever carried out by a single person.

Shortly before the island massacre, he killed eight people when he blew up a
bomb in a van parked in the government block in Oslo.

He called his actions “cruel but necessary”, a plan he apparently
spent years plotting and carried out alone.

Last week, his lawyer Geir Lippestad said Breivik would during his trial “not
only defend (his actions) but will also lament, I think, not going further.”

According to his manifesto, Breivik began his ideological crusade in 2002 as
part of the “Knights Templar” – an organisation whose existence
police have never been able to confirm.

He put his plan into action in late 2009, preparing in minute detail the
bloodiest attack on Norwegian soil since World War II, making sure to arouse
no suspicions.

He became a textbook example of the “lone wolf” who lived a
reclusive life in an apartment with his mother before renting a farm, a move
that enabled him to acquire the fertilisers he needed to build his bomb.

“For me he just looked like your average guy. He could easily go
unnoticed,” a neighbour told AFP. “A well-kept Norwegian that no
one would suspect.”

A first psychiatric examination carried out last year found him to be
suffering from “paranoid schizophrenia” and criminally insane, a
diagnosis that meant he would in all likelihood be sentenced to a closed
psychiatric ward.

But a second opinion published earlier this month found him to be sane, paving
the way for a possible prison sentence.

Breivik himself has said being sent to a psychiatric ward would be “worse
than death”, and wanted to be declared sane so as not to damage the
political message presented in his manifesto, according to his lawyers.

Source: agencies

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