By then, Breivik was already on his way out of Møllergata, where he turned right to drive down to the sea and into the Opera Tunnel, where the motorway ran under the fjord. He set the van’s GPS to the coordinates he had programmed in when he was examining the hull of the MS Thorbjørn.
The security guard in the government quarter decided to ring the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency to ask for the name and telephone number of the van’s owner. That was what they usually did, so they could ring the driver and ask him to move his vehicle.
* * *
A young man came up the little access way from Møllergata towards the fountain at Einar Gerhardsen’s Square. He was wearing a white shirt and had a laptop case slung across his back. The young lawyer was not at work today, but he had just finished a report on customs agreements between the EU and the developing world and wanted to show it to his team. ‘Just email it,’ said his colleague in the legal department, but Jon Vegard Lervåg wanted to hand it over in person, so he could wish everybody a good summer holiday at the same time. He had just got married, and over the weekend he and his young wife would be going home across the mountains to the coastal town of Ålesund to tell their parents the good news – they were expecting their first child.
The man crossed Grubbegata. He was fit and agile, an active hill runner who favoured the steep mountains of Western Norway. He was thirty-two, the same age as the man who had just left the government quarter and was now on his way to the motorway tunnel. They were born in the same month of the same year; only four days separated them. Four days and infinity.
Jon Vegard Lervåg was a member of a group of law-clinic volunteers and of Amnesty International. Anders Behring Breivik was a member of the Knights Templar and Oslo Pistol Club. Jon Vegard, who was a competent classical guitarist, was looking forward to a Prince concert the following evening and to his trip home on Sunday. He was looking forward to becoming a father in February. Four days separated them, and eternity.
As Jon Vegard came abreast of the van it exploded into a sea of flame. He was thrown sideways by a pressure wave so powerful that he was killed instantly, even before the splinters of glass and metal hit him.
The time was 15.25.22.
Two young women, lawyers at the Ministry who were standing behind the van, were also lifted into the air by the pressure wave, engulfed in the sea of flame and thrown to the ground. They too were killed instantly. Two receptionists in the Tower Block were thrown out of their seats, over the counter and out into the square. Glass blew into the building, doors were smashed, window ledges became jagged spears of wood and shards of metal red-hot knifepoints. Everything was hurled either into the building or out over the square, street and fountain, where eight now lay dead or dying. Around them lay numerous injured people, knocked unconscious by the pressure wave or with deep cuts.
Sheets of paper descended. Gently, almost floating in the wind, they fluttered down over the scene of destruction.
Fragments of Jon Vegard’s body flew through the air and spread along the façade of the Tower Block. Only one hand landed intact on the ground. On one of his fingers his wedding ring remained unscathed.
* * *
‘What was that?’ said the Prime Minister when he heard the bang.
Jens Stoltenberg was sitting at his desk, talking on the phone. That morning, he had decided to work from his residence in Parkveien, behind the Royal Palace. It was the holiday period and quiet, so there had been no need to go into the office in the Tower Block. He was preparing the speech he would be making on Utøya the next day. Its theme was the economy and the fight for full employment. His pet subjects.
When the bang came, he was on the phone to the president of the Parliament, Dag Terje Andersen, who was in a forest down south. Thunder, thought the Prime Minister; the forecast was for stormy weather.
They carried on talking.
* * *
A secretary from the Prime Minister’s office was in the reception area when the bomb went off. She was killed instantly by the pressure wave. Outside Stoltenberg’s door in the Tower Block lay one of his security guards, knocked unconscious, while the PM’s communications adviser ran out of his office on the fifteenth floor when the windows blew in. Blood was dripping onto his shoes. He put a hand to his head and his fingers turned red. There was a deep gouge across the back of his head and blood was welling through his copper-coloured hair. He ran back into the wreckage of the office for something to staunch the bleeding. He found a T-shirt in a bag and pressed it to the wound.
As he ran down the stairs he rang the Prime Minister on his direct line. ‘Hi, it’s Arvid. Are you okay?’
‘Yes,’ said Stoltenberg. He still had Andersen on the other line.
‘You’re not hurt?’
‘No…’
As Arvid Samland made his escape down the partially dark, wrecked stairwell he told the Prime Minister what he could see. He and various other employees were trying to get out of the building. There was smoke and thick dust everywhere, fallen masonry and fittings were blocking sections of the steps and splinters of glass covered the staircase where Picasso’s sand-blasted lines hung undamaged.
Beneath the block, the security guard had held the phone in his hand and was about to dial the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency when the bang came. The ceiling shuddered, all the monitors went black, lights and alarms started flashing, and water pipes sprang leaks. He rang the Oslo police district instead, and was thus the first person to alert them to the explosion.
Meanwhile, hundreds of people were running away from the Tower Block. Smoke was gushing out of the building and several storeys were on fire; the building could collapse at any moment or there could be another explosion. Others just stood there gaping. Or they got out their phones and rang home.
The security guard who had alerted the police stayed in front of his screens. He found his way back to the pictures of the van that had parked six minutes earlier. As soon as he had viewed the recording again, he rang the police for a second time.
‘It’s a vehicle that exploded,’ he said, and told them about a man wearing a dark uniform who left the van minutes before it blew up.
* * *
Three guards came into the Prime Minister’s office in Parkveien, put him into a bulletproof vest and ordered him to follow them to a secure room. The fact that the attack in the centre had been directed at the government building meant it was possible the Prime Minister’s residence could also be a target.
Still, no armed guards were directed to protect the building.
* * *
Breivik had the radio on as he drove. He had not heard any blast.
Something had gone wrong; the fuse had not detonated the explosives. It had failed!
The Crafter should have blown up long since, he thought as the traffic came to a standstill in the Opera Tunnel.
A few hundred metres from Hammersborg, however, the Pelican cases had gone crashing over in the back of the van. Perhaps the explosion had happened just then, and he had not heard it because of the noise? Or … it occurred to him, perhaps it was actually the air pressure from the explosion that had made the cases fall over.
He drove on. Turned up the radio. A few minutes later the broadcast was interrupted with the news that there had been an explosion in the government quarter.
Yes! It had gone off.
* * *
The first police car reached the scene three minutes after the explosion. Ten ambulances were also dispatched. Several passers-by stopped to give first aid. Oslo University Hospital was put on major incident alert and the accident and emergency department prepared for many admissions. One of the firemen sent to the government quarter was Magnus, Anders’s childhood friend, the one who had just called him at the farm about coming for a visit, who had worried, and wondered when his friend would emerge from his tunnel and be himself again.
Nine minutes after the explosion, a call came through on the police public hotline.
‘Er, hello, Andreas Olsen here. I’m ringing because I saw something very suspicious as I was going past the government quarter.’
The operator said she could not take his tip-off then and there, and that it would be better if he called back. Olsen interrupted her and said he had observed a man in police uniform walking along with a pistol in his hand.
‘I’m sorry, you do realise I can’t take this now, but what’s your name?’
‘This is a concrete lead about a car,’ Olsen insisted. He was the pedestrian with the bunch of roses who had seen Breivik walking up from the government quarter. He gave a brief account of what he had seen: a man with a crash helmet and pistol, who had ‘something strange about him’. The man had left the area unaccompanied and got into a grey van with the registration number VH 24605.
The operator had just read the report from the security guard in the basement of the Tower Block, and put the two pieces of information together. She realised this was an important tip-off and noted it down on a yellow Post-it note.
She took the note with her to the joint operational centre and put it on the leader’s desk. Although the chief of operations was busy on the phone, the operator thought she had made eye contact with her. Her impression was that the supervisor had registered that the note was important.
She went out.
The note sat there.
While a Fiat Doblò VH 24605 was stuck in the queue for the Opera Tunnel, the note sat there.
Untouched on the desk, in a room in chaos, it did not disturb anyone.
The Oslo police district did not have any shared alert procedures, so the chief of operations – who should have been leading the action – got out the telephone book. Once she had looked through the holiday rota detailing who was in charge of what over the summer break, she started ringing staff members one by one. Instead of taking the lead at the joint operational centre and coordinating action with the incident commanders in the field, she gave priority to calling individual officers in for duty. In the acute phase there was hardly any contact between the chief of operations and the on-scene commanders in charge of the secure and rescue operations in the government quarter.
Anders Behring Breivik was still in the queue to get into the Opera Tunnel. He was afraid the whole of Oslo was already shut off because of the bomb attack and that he would never get to the next phase of his plan.
Had he been the police chief, he would have blocked all the main arteries, he reasoned. Perhaps the security forces had already hermetically sealed off the capital.
But no roadblocks were set up, no roads were closed. It was not even considered. No attempt was made to stop the escape of a potential perpetrator. All available manpower was deployed to the government quarter and the rescue work there, including the elite emergency response unit that went by the name of Delta.
In the chaos there was still nobody to pick up the yellow note. None of the police on the streets were asked to look out for a Fiat Doblò delivery van with the registration number VH 24605, or a guard in a dark uniform in a civilian vehicle.
Breivik was still very close by. It took him a long time to get through the eastern city centre and the tunnel under the Oslofjord before he re-emerged at ground level in the western part of the centre. From the Opera Tunnel he drove past the US embassy, which was now swarming with security personnel. The police had taken up positions outside the embassy. He drove right past. Ha, they’ve assumed it’s Islamic terrorism of course, he thought. He amused himself listening to the terror experts on the radio saying this pointed to al-Qaida.
The security mobilisation at the embassy pushed up his stress level a bit and he was afraid someone would react to the fact that he was wearing a helmet and uniform in a delivery van. He had to calm down. The crucial thing was not to crash. He passed the corner of the Royal Gardens, he crossed Parkveien, where the Prime Minister was in a secure room, and he drove up Bygdøy Allé with its exclusive shops. There were clusters of green horse chestnuts hanging on the huge trees. He was in his own district, his own biotope. He passed blocks of luxury flats, he drove past Fritzners gate where he had lived in the very first years of his life. A few streets away, on the other side of the avenue, was the flat he had rented in his twenties. He knew the streets here, the bars and the shops. He knew the escape routes and shortcuts. He now knew he would get out of the city; the police would never be able to close off all the roads to the west.
He sped out of Oslo.
* * *
As time went on, there were more reports from members of the public who had observed a man in uniform leaving the van a few minutes before it blew up. The security guards in several ministry buildings viewed the CCTV tapes that showed the sequence of events from different angles. They provided a description identical to the one given by Andreas Olsen.
But no alerts were sent out from the joint operational centre at the police headquarters in Oslo, neither to the force itself nor to the public via the media.
At 15.55, half an hour after the bomb had gone off, an operator happened to see the yellow note lying on the unit leader’s desk. Twenty minutes had passed since Andreas Olsen reported his information. Now, they rang him back and asked him to go through it all again.
‘And that was before the explosion?’ asked the operator after Olsen had once again explained what he had seen.
‘Five…’
‘What did you say – it was?’
‘It was five minutes before the explosion.’
‘Are you sure he was in police uniform?’
‘There was a police badge on the sleeve. I can’t say whether it was a genuine police uniform. But I thought police, because I saw a helmet with one of those glass visors in front and he’d got a pistol out. So I wondered if there was some operation going on, because I thought the whole thing was … that is, something made me react.’
‘But that was five minutes before the explosion?’
Olsen confirmed this again and gave a description: European appearance, in his thirties, about 1.80 metres tall. The operator became convinced that this was an important lead. ‘Good observation. What was the registration number of that car?’
By the time they rang off, it was 16.02.
After the call, the operator marked the report as Important in the operation log and made sure it was accessible to all. She also filled in the on-scene commander, who asked her to pass the report on to a patrol from the emergency response squad. It was impossible to get through on the communication radio, so she found their mobile number and rang them.
At 16.03, Breivik passed the police station in Sandvika, on the E18. If the officers had been looking out of the windows, they would have seen the silver-grey van driving past on the main road. Sandvika had men ready and waiting, but did not know what to do with them and was awaiting a request for assistance from Oslo.
At 16.05 the operator in Oslo made a mobile phone call to the emergency response unit informing them of the man in a dark uniform driving a Fiat Doblò. She also gave them the registration number. The patrol said the description was too vague for any action to be taken.
At 16.09 the chief of operations in Asker and Bærum, the district through which Breivik was now driving, finally got through to Oslo police district to offer assistance. She was informed about the van and the possible perpetrator. At that point in time, the station at Asker and Bærum had three patrol cars at its disposal; the chief of operations rang the closest one and gave the description. This patrol was on its way to Ila prison to pick up a prisoner who was to be taken to Oslo. The chief of operations asked them to postpone the prisoner transport because of the bomb in Oslo. She also alerted the two other patrols and read over the radio the type of vehicle, registration number and description. Then she once again contacted the patrol at Ila prison, which by then should have been free, and commanded it to go out on observation along the E18.
But the two policemen in the patrol car had chosen to ignore their orders. They had picked up the prison
er from the prison after all and were now on their way into Oslo. They had wanted to ‘get the job out of the way’, they said. In the operation log, the prisoner transport was marked Priority 5, the lowest level. The country’s seat of government had been blown up yet the patrol decided to act on its own whim. Asker and Bærum’s second patrol had been busy with a psychiatric assignment and had been given orders to leave it. That order was not obeyed either.
And this at the very moment Breivik was driving through their district, in a light-coloured Fiat Doblò VH 24605, just like the one the chief of operations had described to them over the radio. Two police patrols could have been positioned along the E18 and could have followed him. Nobody did. Breivik pushed on westwards.
To judge by the way the Oslo police was behaving, little indicated that Norway had just been the target of an act of terror, with an acute risk of secondary attacks. When other districts offered support, their offers were largely declined, even though many potential targets around Oslo remained unsecured. The Parliament requested reinforcements as there were no armed officers outside the main building. You will have to make do with your own guards, the head of the Oslo operational centre informed them. Just close off some of your buildings, the head of security at the Parliament was told. The Labour Party offices at Youngstorget asked for police guards; the House of the People asked for police guards. Their requests were turned down, with the advice to evacuate their premises.
Norway owns a single police helicopter. And in July, the helicopter service was on holiday. As a consequence of new savings measures, there was no emergency crew cover at the height of the summer. The first pilot nonetheless reported for duty right after hearing about the bomb on the news. He was told he was not needed.
Yet the emergency response unit requested use of the helicopter twice in the hour that followed. The squad was informed that the helicopter was unavailable, even though it was on the tarmac, fully operational and ready to fly. Nor did the police take any steps to mobilise military helicopters or make use of civilian helicopter companies.
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