One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway

by Åsne Seierstad

  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 t
he 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.’

  The picture was taken from the water and illustrated just how steep it was. It was a drop of about thirteen metres. ‘This is not a place where anyone would go down to the water as a matter of course,’ said Dyvesveen. ‘I would say it is so steep that you would not get back up again without assistance.’

  A white circle on the picture showed a rock. The forensic technician explained that a boy was found lying there. The pathologist described the injuries. She always gave the victim’s name and age first.

  ‘Simon was three days short of his nineteenth birthday,’ she said. She indicated on the dummy where the deadly bullet had hit him: entering his back and coming out through his chest. ‘Simon died of the bullet wounds to his chest, which rapidly led to unconsciousness and death.’

  Heavy breathing could be heard. Tone and Gunnar were finding it all totally unreal. Simon definitely wasn’t here, in this place.

  Public advocate Nadia Hall read the short eulogy. ‘Social commitment and an interest in culture came early for Simon. He was the leader of his local youth council from the age of fifteen. He was the founder member of the AUF branch in Salangen and was due to go straight on from Utøya to a conference in Russia. He had been to Cambodia to make a film about water. His brutal murder before he reached nineteen is felt as a huge tragedy. The loss of Simon will leave many people poorer in the years to come. He leaves behind him a mum, a dad and a younger brother.’

  Breivik spent most of the time looking down at his papers during the autopsy reports. He did the same that day.

  He said nothing. He had no comment.

  * * *

  Once the court was adjourned for the day, Tone and Gunnar Sæbø went out with Anders Kristiansen’s parents. The two sets of parents had been together for the last couple of days; they had finished in Oslo now and were going home to Troms.

  On leaving the courthouse the four of them walked up towards the park round the Royal Palace. At the National Gallery, a policeman was blocking off the street. The parents stopped.

  Then they saw it.

  A motorcycle came at full speed, then a white van and finally a police car.

  ‘Cobblestones! Are there any cobblestones here?’ cried Viggo Kristiansen.

  But there were no loose cobblestones.

  The van sped past. The dads were left standing there.

  ‘Oh, we would have thrown them hard!’ said Gunnar Sæbø.

  The two fathers looked at each other. Staring into the other’s powerlessness.

  ‘Why did we just sit there?’ Viggo demanded fiercely. ‘There in the courtroom. Why didn’t we do anything? Why didn’t we shout something? Why did we all behave so bloody nicely?’

  They had even tried to stifle their sobs, there in the grey-painted room. They had not wanted to be noticed. Did not want to be any trouble.

  Gunnar looked at Viggo.

  ‘We were paralysed,’ he answered. ‘We are paralysed.’

  The Will to Live

  After a week of autopsy reports and eulogies for those murdered on Utøya, the schedule said: the aggrieved.

  After the four-day break for Norwegian National Day, the court participants’ faces looked tanned. The public in the courtroom dressed more lightly in the mid-May heat of Oslo. The bereaved families had gone home to their regions and were now following the trial from district courts all around the country.

  There were no more words of remembrance to be read. Time had come for the testimonies of the survivors.

  I lost my best friend.

  I heard a loud, deep scream.

  I’m not sure if I heard shots first, then screams, or screams first and then shots.

  He begged: Please, please don’t do it.

  I thought it must be my turn next.

  I had two rocks in my hands.

  I put my tongue between my teeth to stop them making a noise.

  The survivors were muted. They were grave. Many of them felt guilty. Survivor’s guilt.

  I was swimming just ahead of him. He dropped behind. Then I turned round and he wasn’t there any more.

  Or the girl who had removed a bullet from her thigh before she swam for it: I was the delegation leader of my county, and I lost the three youngest.

  All the survivors were asked how they were now. There was no room for big words.

  It’s going fine. Kind of at half speed.

  Or: It’ll be all right.

  Or: It varies a lot, up and down, pretty hard going actually.

  Some of the young people Breivik had tried to kill asked for him to leave the room while they gave their evidence. But most of them wanted him there. Often, they did not deign to look at him. Whereas
he was there in his seat, obliged to listen to them. No one cursed or spoke directly to him. The strongest expressions came from a girl who called him blockhead and idiot.

  For many, it was a stage in working through their trauma to see him sitting there. The man who had opened fire on them would not be able to harm anyone again.

  * * *

  One boy had prepared himself for giving evidence more thoroughly than he had ever prepared for anything.

  He was summoned to appear as a witness on 22 May.

  It was Viljar.

  After he started singing on that sixth night, he fell asleep again. He drifted in and out of consciousness, a state that gradually became more of a morphine-induced haze than a coma. He woke and slept, woke and dozed off again. His parents and the doctors still knew nothing about how his brain was faring, how badly damaged it had been by the shot through his eye that had smashed his skull. It was a good sign that he had remembered those lines of the song, said the doctors. But then he said no more after that, just went back to sleep again. The corners of his mouth would occasionally twitch when Martin said something funny, when his mother stroked his cheek and his father gave him a hug, or when Torje told him about the Norway Cup match he had played in. Only Viljar knew what was going on inside his head, and he lacked the strength to tell anyone.

  The day he woke up and summoned enough energy to say something, he called out to his mother: ‘Mum, I can’t see at all well. Can you get my glasses for me?’

  ‘Viljar, you’ve … lost an eye, you were shot in the eye, but the other eye—’

  ‘It’ll still be better with the glasses,’ he insisted. These were his longest sentences since he was brought from Utøya.

  ‘They’re on the top shelf on the left just inside the living room in Roger’s flat,’ said Viljar.

  And so they were. ‘A really, really good sign,’ the doctors said in relief.

  Viljar was able to retell the tall stories Martin had recounted on that sixth night, the night the doctors said he came closest to death, when he grew colder and colder. Every heartbeat had been an exertion. His continuing pulse a succession of gifts. Viljar had been somewhere in among it all, the whole time; he remembered the cold and how much he had shivered. He recalled the hugs and the tears, and that he had wanted to respond, wanted to smile, wanted to open his eyes and laugh, but his body would not obey. It was too exhausted. And he had been so cold.