Oslo - Anders Behring Breivik came across as your average guy but behind
his courteous exterior lurked one of history's most gruesome killers,
fuelled by a hatred of multiculturalism and Islam.
Tall, blond
and with piercing blue eyes, the 33-year-old rightwing extremist has
confessed to killing 77 people on 22 July 22 2011, when he gunned down
youths attending a Labour party camp after setting off a bomb outside
the government offices in Oslo.
The massacre was "a preventive
attack against state traitors" guilty of "ethnic cleansing" due to their
support for a multicultural society, Breivik told a court hearing in
February.
His trial opens in Oslo on Monday.
Born on 13
February 1979 in tranquil and affluent Norway, Breivik grew up without
anyone around him suspecting what would one day unfold.
He has
said he had an unremarkable childhood, with a diplomat father and a
nurse mother who divorced when he was just one year old.
Contact adverse child
"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
4-years-old.
"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.
Cut off from father
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-years-old, 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.
Laid back
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
22 July 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.
Knight Templar
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.
Criminally insane
"For me
he just looked like your average guy. He could easily go unnoticed," a
neighbour said. "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.
- AFP