Norwegian Police Say Response to Shooting Rampage Was as Fast as Possible
Anders Behring Breivik
AFP/Getty Images
Norwegian police said they responded as fast as possible to reports of shooting on the island of Utoeya, where Anders Behring Breivik went on a rampage that claimed the lives of as many as 86 youths.
Norwegian police said they responded as fast as possible to reports of shooting on the island of Utoeya, where Anders Behring Breivik went on a rampage that claimed the lives of as many as 86 youths. Photographer: AFP/Getty Images
Norwegian police said they responded as fast as possible to reports of shooting on the island of Utoeya, where Anders Behring Breivik went on a rampage that claimed the lives of 68 youths.
The first report of the July 22 shooting was received at 5:27 p.m. by police in the Nordre Buskerud district in which Utoeya is located and the gunman was apprehended at 6:27 p.m. by the Emergency Response Team from Oslo, two minutes after they arrived on the island, spokesman Henning Holtaas said by phone. Officers in Oslo were dealing with the aftermath of a related bomb attack in the capital as the island shooting began.
“I completely understand that for those caught in the line of fire as well as for their relatives the response time felt long,” Chief of Police Sissel Hammer of Nordre Buskerud Police District said in a statement yesterday. “However, I ask for understanding of the fact that the deployment of armed police personnel will always require time. Personnel need time to be equipped and armed as well as transported to the scene.”
The twin attacks on Utoeya and in Oslo killed 76 people in all, with most of the victims shot on the island about 40 kilometers (28 miles) from the capital by car, the police said today, revising down an earlier estimate of 93 fatalities. The police will have to answer questions about the speed of their response to the events on Utoeya, Oslo-based newspaper Dagbladet reported.
Single Helicopter
The Emergency Response Team had already been assembled in Oslo following the bomb attack two hours earlier, which claimed the lives of eight people, and travelled to the island by car because the only helicopter available to the police was not equipped for the task, Holtaas said. Police in Norway do not routinely carry firearms.
“Considering the equipment that they needed, it was easier as they sat in their cars, just to drive directly out there,” Holtaas said. Norway’s only police helicopter is used for monitoring and surveillance and “doesn’t have the capacity in that helicopter to bring personnel.”
Breivik’s rampage on the island lasted 90 minutes, during which he is alleged to have called on the youths to come to him for police protection, before shooting them point-blank. He was wearing a fake police uniform.
Breivik was detained for eight weeks pending trial at a closed court hearing in Oslo today. At least four of those weeks will be spent in isolation, with no visits, letters or contact with the outside world, Judge Kim Heger told reporters.
Lessons to Learn
Of the 97 people injured in the twin attacks, 67 were from the island shootings, Oslo’s acting police chief Sveinung Sponheim said at a press conference yesterday.
“So far we have not seen anything that didn’t work as expected or planned” in the police operation, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview today on BBC World. Now is the time to comfort the relatives and friends of those killed and injured, and “afterward we will go through everything that happened, learn from the experiences,” he said. “Of course there will always be something we can learn and where we could have been more prepared.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Josiane Kremer in Oslo at jkremer4@bloomberg.net; Stephen Treloar at streloar1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Angela Cullen at acullen8@bloomberg.net
Rate this Page