Blue-eyed blond who killed 92

Stockholm, July 23 (Agencies): A 32-year-old blond, blue-eyed man held for massacring at least 92 people yesterday in Norway’s worst killings since World War II is a mystery to police: a Christian fundamentalist with anti-Muslim views but no known links to Far Right extremists.

“He just came out of nowhere,” an officer said about the Norwegian identified by the media as Anders Behring Breivik, whose target seems to have been the country’s liberal government that backs multiculturalism but whose only discovered tweet quotes liberal icon John Stuart Mill.

The former management student is suspected to have carried out all by himself both the bombing of government buildings in Oslo that killed seven and the shooting spree at a ruling Labor Party summer camp on Utoya island hours later that left at least 85 young people dead.

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, recalling summers spent on Utoya as a young man, said the island was “my childhood paradise that... was transformed into Hell”.

Breivik ran a company that grew vegetables on Oslo’s outskirts, which the authorities said allowed him to buy a large quantity of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, which can be used to make explosives.

A Facebook page under Breivik’s name, set up yesterday, lists his politics as conservative and marital status as single. It says he enjoys hunting, the video games World of Warcraft and Modern Warfare 2, and books including Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince and George Orwell’s 1984.

A Twitter account under his name had just one tweet, on July 17, loosely quoting English philosopher Mill: “One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.”

Details later emerged that Breivik was a member of the Progress Party, the second largest in parliament, from 2004 to 2006 and of its youth wing from 1997 to 2006. The party wants curbs on immigration. He also wrote blogs on a website last year attacking multiculturalism and Islam.

Norwegian media said Breivik legally owned several firearms. Utoya survivors recalled a tall gunman in police uniform with a handgun and a machine gun.

Wounded survivor Adrian Pracon said the killer “looked like Nazi to me because of the hair... and he was also very, very calm and controlled and sure about what he was doing. He aimed the gun at me and I screamed, ‘No, please no.’ I don’t know if he listened to me but he spared me.”

“He’s obviously cold as ice,” an officer said.

Breivik is believed to have grown up in Oslo, studied at the Oslo School of Management, and done national service in the Norwegian military.

A newspaper quoted a friend as saying Breivik turned to Right-wing extremism in his late 20s and participated in online forums expressing strong nationalistic views. His registered address is a four-storey apartment building in Oslo — some reports said it belongs to his mother.

An officer said Breivik had no criminal record except for some minor offences. He was arrested in Utoya and was keen to “explain himself” to interrogators, and faced terrorism charges that carry a jail term of up to 21 years.

“It’s strange that he didn’t kill himself, like the guys that have carried out school shootings,” the officer said.