“I settled on the palace in a setting where the royal family wouldn’t be
hurt,” he said. “Most nationalists and cultural conservatives are
supporters of the monarchy, including myself.”
The anti-Muslim militant said the three bombs would be followed by several
shooting massacres, if he survived. He decided against multiple bombs
because building one was “much more difficult than I thought.”
Breivik earlier said he used computer games to prepare for his attacks, once
spending an entire year playing a game for hours on end.
Breivik, on trial for massacring 77 people last July, said he spent “lots
of time” playing Modern Warfare, a first-person shooting game, and also
took an entire year off to play World of Warcraft, a multiplayer
role-playing game with more than 10 million subscribers.
“I don’t really like those games but it is good if you want to simulate
for training purposes,” Breivik said as he discussed Modern Warfare,
smiling when asked about the aiming system.
Breivik killed eight people with a car bomb in Oslo on July 22 and then killed
69, mostly teenagers, at a Labour Party summer youth camp on Utoya island,
in a gun massacre.
Although he pleaded not guilty, he admitted the killings, saying his victims
were traitors who supported immigration and multiculturalism, threatening Norwegian
ethnic purity.
Breivik, who once played Modern Warfare 17-hours straight on New Year’s Eve
2010/2011, said he used such games to simulate the police response and the
best escape strategy.
“I calculated the likelihood of surviving unharmed at less than 5 per
cent,” he told the court in his third day of testimony, referring to
the bomb attack on government headquarters, when he expected to be swarmed
by police officers.
“I trained myself to get out of such a situation. That is what I was
simulating.”
When he acquired the weapons for the actual attacks, he turned to Norse
mythology in naming them.
“The rifle I called Gungnir, which is the name of the magical spear of
Odin, which returns after you have thrown it. And the Glock I called
Mjoelnir … It is the warrior god Thor’s Hammer,” he said, adding that
he marked the weapons with their names in runes.
While playing computer games, Breivik said, he withdrew from his friends,
saying personal relationships were not a priority.
In 2006, he moved in with his mother to save money and rarely interrupted his
game of World of Warcraft, even though his mother became anxious.
“Of course I couldn’t tell her I was going to take a sabbatical because I
am going to blow myself up in five years’ time.”
“During that year I played perhaps 16 hours a day. It was a lot. Only
playing for an entire year – playing and sleeping, playing and sleeping …
It was a dream I had, and I wanted to do this.”
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a professor of social anthropology at the University
of Oslo, said such computer games could put Breivik in a state of delusion.
“When he went out on Utoya, possibly at some level still believing he was
still paying a computer game and shooting people in real life,” Eriksen
told Reuters away from the court proceedings.
“He does not seem to be very successful at distinguishing between the
virtual reality of world of Warcraft and other computer games and reality,”
he said.
Breivik’s trial, set to last 10 weeks, turns on the question of his sanity and
thus whether he can be jailed. He has said that an insanity ruling would be “worse
than death”.
One court-appointed team of psychiatrists concluded he was psychotic, while a
second team found him to be of sound mind.
On Wednesday he said he should either be executed or acquitted, calling the
prospect of a prison sentence “pathetic”.
Breivik has insisted he is a commander in a resistance movement but has
acknowledged some of his claims were an exaggeration. He spent much of
Wednesday defending the claim that it existed at all.
In court, he has Breivik struggled to defend his claim of being ordained into
a militant-nationalist group called the Knights Templar in London in 2002
after preliminary contact in 2001, refusing to answer over 100 questions on
the topic.
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