The brother of a man gunned down by Anders Behring Breivik hurled a shoe at the mass killer in court yesterday, shouting: “Go to hell, go to hell, you killed my brother.”
The outburst followed days of harrowing testimony from survivors of Norway’s worst peacetime massacre.The shoe missed Breivik but struck his co-defence lawyer, Vibeke Hein Baera, who was seated closest to the public gallery, during the presentation of an autopsy report.
Police said the attacker, who was quickly escorted from the court, was a brother of one of the 69 people Breivik methodically shot dead on the small island of Utoeya last July during a youth camp organised by the ruling Labour Party. Breivik admits the killings but denies criminal responsibility, saying he was defending Norwegian ethnic purity from Muslim immigration and the multiculturalism policies of the governing Labour Party.The Aftenposten newspaper named the man who threw the shoe as Hayder Mustafa Qasim, an Iraqi whose asylum-seeker brother was killed on the island by Breivik. “I took off my shoe, stood up, shouted at the killer, got eye contact with him and threw the shoe,” Qasim told Aftenposten. “‘Go to hell killer!’ I shouted. He looked right into my eyes. I felt that he had understood my message.” – (Reuters)