Major Media Stokes Breivik Crazy Defense, Preps Insanity Plea
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Norway gunman's tale diverges sharply from reality
...a long thread of delusion winding throughout the 1,518-page manifesto Breivik e-mailed to hundreds of people hours before he set out on his murderous rampage...
In the world according to Anders Behring Breivik, a seat on Oslo's city council was once nearly in his grasp — until he was sidelined by a jealous adversary. Nonsense, says the so-called rival, who notes that Breivik attended just five or six party meetings and barely spoke.
...Breivik writes, he spent a year working alongside a mentor who schooled him in the ways of business and management. The man calls that a bizarre exaggeration, noting that the only thing he taught Breivik was how to record corporate minutes.
Those conflicts between Breivik's account and reality hint at a long thread of delusion winding throughout the 1,518-page manifesto he e-mailed to hundreds of people hours before he set out on a murderous rampage just over a week ago.
...But they also recall Breivik as the one who repeatedly stepped forward to stop the most popular kids in school from teasing or bullying his classmates. He was a singular boy, reluctant to reveal his own thoughts, but one who would willingly sit for hours in the garden outside a friend's house listening to her talk about herself.
"If someone were mean to me he would always stand up for me ... and I think in his head he was just trying to protect us," recalls Caroline Fronth, a friend of Breivik's between 7th and 9th grade.
Breivik, 32, claims he carried out the attacks as part of a network of modern-day crusaders, the Knights Templar, to launch a revolution against a Europe spoiled by Muslim immigration, and that there are other cells ready to strike.
...investigators say they have found no signs, before or after the attacks, of a larger conspiracy...
...His mother, a nurse who also remarried, won custody, raising her son in a first-floor apartment on the west side of Oslo, generally considered the most fashionable and affluent part of the city.
At school, Breivik did not have many friends, but he was hardly anti-social, said Michael Tomala, a former classmate. Breivik spent hours lifting weights, often with a friend, Arsalan Ahmad Sohail, the son of a Pakistani immigrant family, leaving the pair of boys bigger than many of their classmates.
...Fronth, who recalls... Breivik was very impressionable, trying to prove his worth by doing what the most popular classmates did.
But he rarely voiced his own feelings, beyond his apparent irritation at classmates' infatuation with social status.
"It was hard for us to get into his head," Fronth said. "I think he was pretty intelligent, but he didn't show emotion. He didn't smile much or ever cry. He was just there all the time. It was really hard to figure out who he was."
Berg, who says Breivik struck him as "deeply disturbed," could not be reached for additional comment.
Two years later, Breivik writes, he was nominated by the Progress Party to run for a seat on the Oslo city council and "came relatively close to being elected." But according to the manifesto, those aspirations were stonewalled by "my rival" Joran Kallmyr, who was chairman of the party's youth wing and is now a vice mayor of Oslo.
"I barely remember him," Kallmyr said in an interview. Breivik attended just five or six meetings of the youth party, his presence unremarkable except for the fact that he was the only one wearing a tie, Kallmyr said.
In 2002, Breivik writes, he started the first of a few business ventures, a software outsourcing company. At about the same time, he says he began laying plans for radical action, concluding that working through traditional political channels would be fruitless.
Three years later, he writes, the company had grown into a successor firm that employed seven people, but he was secretly using it as a front, "with the purpose of financing resistance/liberation related military operations."
In June of 2010, he renewed a membership in the Oslo Pistol Club. Gun ownership is tightly restricted in Norway, but relatively common, reflecting the popularity of hunting.
He used two guns during his rampage on Utoya island, both of which police say he bought legally.
But Breivik wrote that he had said nothing to friends and family about his views or intentions, telling them only that he was working on new business ventures, including one that involved farming, and that he was nearing completion of a book he had been researching for many years.
In March, he visited his former stepmother, Overmo retired after a career with Norway's foreign service, at her home south of Oslo.
"Although I care for her a great deal, I wouldn't hold it against the (Knights Templar) if she was executed during an attack against UDI," Norway's immigration agency, Breivik wrote in his manifesto.
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Norway: Anders Behring Breivik 'believes he is at war'by paveldunghd937 views
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