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The face of a mass killer. Anders Behring Breivik smiles on hearing the judge read the verdict declaring him sane when he carried out the massacre last year
A Norwegian court has declared Anders Behring Breivik who had admitted admitted killing 77 people and wounding more than 240 others sane and sentenced him to 21 years in jail. It was on July 22 last year that Breivik bombed central Oslo and then opened fire at an island youth camp.
The 33-year-old mass killer, smiling as the judgement was read out by Judge Wenche Arntzen, had been insisting he was sane when he carried out the massacre. He refused to plead guilty and sought to justify his attacks by saying they were necessary to stop the "Islamisation" of Norway. He accused the governing Labour Party of promoting multiculturalism and endangering Norway's identity.
Prosecutors had called for him to be considered insane, but the five judges were unanimous in ruling that Breivik was sane.
He was convicted of terrorism and premeditated murder, and given the maximum sentence of 21 years' imprisonment. But that can be prolonged at a later date if he is deemed to remain a danger to society.
Many relatives and survivors at the court room reacted with relief as declared Breivik to be sane, sentencing him to at least 21 years in prison. Breivik will serve his sentence at Oslo's high-security Ila Prison, where he has been held in isolation for most of the time since his arrest.
Though some of the victims' parents may have felt happy at the verdict, most of them wished he could have been sentenced to 21 years in prison for each of the 77 lives he took. For others the outcome seemed irrelevant as their nobody could ever bring their loved ones back.
As she read out the verdict, Judge Arntzen said that the court considered Breivik to be suffering from "narcissistic personality characteristics" but not psychosis. She imposed a sentence of "preventive detention," a special prison term for criminals considered dangerous to society, and set the minimum length of imprisonment to 10 years.
Breivik's trial, which began in March and lasted for 10 weeks, heard graphic testimony from some of the survivors of his attacks.
At first, a team appointed by the court to examine him declared him to be a paranoid schizophrenic, but the second found team of Court-appointed psychiatrists disagreed on Breivik's sanity declaring him to be sane, that means he knew that he was carrying out the evil and criminal acts.
Before the verdict, Breivik had been saying that for him, psychiatric care would be "worse than death". He would not appeal against the verdict, but according to the BBC, the prosecution, which argued for insanity, could still appeal. |
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