Ire as police drop Breivik response probe
2013-01-11 16:03
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Norway
This title in the Discover Countries series looks at Norway.
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Oslo - The family of a teenager killed by Norwegian mass
murderer Anders Breivik reacted angrily on Friday after a probe into police's
slow response to the July 2011 twin attacks was dropped.
"Apparently, no one will ever learn from the grave
mistakes that were made on 22 July, not the police nor anyone else,"
lamented Alf Vederhus who lost his son Haavard in Breivik's mass shooting on
the island of Utoeya.
The Norwegian police's internal affairs unit said in a
statement on Thursday that while there were serious shortcomings in the
police's response, it had dropped its investigation into complaints filed by
the families of two victims because there was no evidence police had broken the
law.
"I think internal affairs looked too lightly on the
mistakes that were made," Vederhus told the daily Dagsavisen.
Breivik, a right-wing extremist, detonated a bomb outside
the centre-left government's headquarters and then went on the rampage at a
Labour Party youth camp on the island of Utoeya, killing a total of 77 people,
many of them teenagers.
He was in August 2012 found sane and sentenced to
Norway's maximum sentence of 21 years in prison, a sentence that can be
extended indefinitely if he is deemed a continued threat to society.
Breivik confessed to the attacks, calling them
"cruel but necessary" to protect his country from the
multiculturalism his victims embraced and which he hates.
Less than two weeks before the verdict was rendered, a
commission tasked with learning lessons from the attacks harshly criticised the
Norwegian authorities, saying the bombing could have been prevented and
Breivik's killing spree could have been stopped earlier.
