ANDERS BEHRING Breivik, the Norwegian on trial for killing 77 people in a bomb and gun rampage, yesterday railed at psychiatrists who diagnosed him as psychotic.
“The person described in that report is not me,” he said on the eighth day of his trial on terrorism and murder charges. “If I had just read it, I would say that person belongs in a madhouse.”
Breivik (33) admits killing eight people with a car bomb at government offices in Oslo, then gunning down 69 people, mostly teenagers, at an island summer camp of the ruling Labour Party, in what he has described as a counterattack against multiculturalism. Two court-appointed psychiatric teams have examined Breivik and come to opposite conclusions about his mental health, and the five-judge trial panel will ultimately decide.
He insisted yesterday that he was of sound mind. “These are not just misunderstandings – they are evil, fictional inventions to support their assumptions,” he said of a 240-page report by experts Torgeir Husby and Synne Soerheim.
He said they might have been pressured by Norway’s government to keep his ideology from getting out. Their report, which diagnoses Breivik as a paranoid schizophrenic suffering from psychosis, was contradicted earlier this month by a second team of experts. Psychiatrist Agnar Aspaas said he and a colleague had found “no evidence” of psychosis.
The two psychiatric teams were arrayed in front of Breivik as he spoke. He told Dr Soerheim he now doubted she was part of a systematic attempt to discredit him.
“I think that you couldn’t comprehend that a normal person could do something like that,” he said. “You think that a person who does something like that . . . must be sick.”
Thousands plan to gather in Oslo today to sing a children’s song calling for fraternity and peace, as a protest against Breivik. He once called the song Marxist brainwashing. – (Reuters)