Norway Mourns Its Dead as Harsh Rhetoric Spreads

By VANESSA FUHRMANS And SVEN GRUNDBERG

OSLO—A Norwegian man confessed to killing nearly 100 people in a pair of attacks on Friday, calling his rampage "atrocious" but "necessary."

Photos: Attacks in Norway

Zuma Press

People mourned outside a cathedral in Oslo on Sunday.

The confession by Anders Behring Breivik, made via his lawyer and preceded by a 1,500-page, xenophobic screed he published online before the massacre, has shocked this small Scandinavian country and unnerved governments across Europe, where far-right parties espousing anti-Muslim views, if not violence, have recently been on the rise.

The attacks, including the bombing of a government building in Oslo and a shooting spree at a Labor Party youth camp on a nearby island, left at least 93 people dead in what authorities described as a deranged attempt to declare war on the forces of multiculturalism and pluralism that have taken hold in Norway and much of Europe.

Mr. Breivik's manifesto against the "Islamization of Western Europe" echoed sentiment that has found a renewed voice on the fringes of mainstream politics from Sweden to Italy. Populist politicians have won votes and influence by arguing that Europe is letting in too many people, especially Muslims who they say don't accept Western values and who, according to these politicians, cause crime and unemployment. The view that fueled Mr. Breivik's extremism "is a sentiment you find in all European countries," said Thomas Hegghammer, a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment in Oslo.

Norway, a relatively wealthy, sparsely populated country, has little recent history of political extremism, much less terrorism. That it was the site of such an attack, even if by an isolated gunman, has unleashed concern across Europe that the anti-immigrant underswell that has swept much of the Continent in recent years could metastasize suddenly and unexpectedly into violence.

As flags across the city hung at half-staff, hundreds of people flocked in the rain Sunday to Oslo Cathedral, where Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, King Harald of Norway and other leaders attended a memorial service. Outside, many onlookers openly wept and milled about for hours as they contributed to a growing carpet of flowers and candles.

Norway's ruling center-left Labor Party, which has long championed immigration and multiculturalism, appeared to be the primary target of the attack.

Police said at least 86 people, many of them teenagers, were killed in the Friday-afternoon shooting at a summer camp for the youth wing of the Labor Party.

About 600 people were present at the time of the attack, which occurred on the island of Utoya north of Oslo. The rampage followed the bombing of government offices in the Norwegian capital that killed at least seven.

The mass shooting on the island went on for more than an hour before a SWAT team arrived. Police were continuing to search for victims and said the death toll could rise when several people missing on the island are accounted for.

A police spokesman said Mr. Breivik, who is 32, set off a car bomb in central Oslo, then traveled to Utoya. They said he used two weapons, a handgun and an automatic weapon, to shoot indiscriminately at people, most of them teens, for over an hour.

The woodsy lake island has for decades been the site of a summer camp for the Labor Party's next generation, a place Prime Minister Stoltenberg described over the weekend as "the paradise of my youth."

In his online writings, Mr. Breivik saw the party youth movement and its campaigns to bring the country's immigrant youth into its fold as a manifestation of multiculturalism gone wrong and the "terrorizing of political conservatives."

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

An undated image on Facebook shows the 32-year-old suspected attacker, whom local media identified as Anders Behring Breivik.

With no bridges to aid the island campers' escape, Mr. Breivik had the time to wander the woods and rocky shore and methodically hunt down his prey. As shots and screams were heard on one part of the island, eyewitnesses said many teens hid in the woods until a man wearing a policeman's uniform arrived, telling them it was all right to come out. When they did, he mowed them down.

Adrian Pracon, a 21-year-old former camper who had returned this summer to work in the information booth, recalled running through the woods and jumping in the water with dozens of others in an effort to escape to the mainland. But he said his clothes grew too heavy with water and forced him back to shore, where Mr. Breivik was.

"I begged him not to shoot me, and he didn't," Mr. Pracon said in a telephone interview from his bed in a nearby hospital. "He wanted to shoot the people still in the water first."

Man accused of shooting and bomb attacks deems killing "atrocious" and "necessary" his lawyer said. Video courtesy Reuters.

By then, he said, Mr. Breivik had switched to firing single rounds, presumably to save bullets. "He was so cold and concentrated" as he continued to walk and shoot the fleeing teens, Mr. Pracon said.

When the gunman returned an hour later to where Mr. Pracon and nearly 20 others lay behind rocks on the shore, Mr. Pracon said he played dead while the shooter killed many of those around him. The shooter put a bullet in Mr. Pracon's shoulder "but I didn't move," the 21-year-old said.

Police said that when they found Mr. Breivik on the island, he surrendered immediately. They said he was answering questions, adding that the interrogation was likely to continue for several days.

Norway Attacks

See the locations of an explosion in Oslo and an attack at a youth camp.

In Norway, anti-immigrant opinions have found few mainstream platforms. Unlike other Scandinavian countries, including Sweden and Denmark, Norway doesn't have a mainstream far-right party.

Norway's oil wealth and relatively open society seem to have blunted such forces. With a more-than-$550 billion sovereign-wealth fund that averages about $112,000 per citizen, high wages and a low 3.4% unemployment rate, it is one of the richest countries in the world.

Mr. Breivik was once a member of Norway's conservative, populist Progress Party, the second-largest group after the Labor Party. The Progress Party has taken a hard line on immigration in the past but less so than populist anti-foreigner parties that have taken hold elsewhere in Scandinavia.

Downtown Oslo

The Progress Party on Sunday denounced the bombing and island massacre as "horrible and cowardly attacks…contrary to the principles and values underpinning the Norwegian society."

Even with modest immigration inflows, the Progress Party's membership has more than doubled and put pressure on Norway's ruling coalition in recent years to propose tighter immigration measures.

—Charles Duxbury and Katarina Gustafsson contributed to this article