Norwegian murderer Anders Behring Breivik has applied for parole after serving just 13 years behind bars. He commited a mass murder and gunned down teenagers in a frightening attack in 2011
A neo-Nazi who killed 77 people in a horrific terror attack has applied for parole.
Anders Behring Breivik, from Norway, committed the country’s worst peacetime atrocity in 2011. The anti-Muslim carried out the mass murder in July of that year. He ruthlessly killed eight with a car bomb in Oslo and then shot 69 people to death at a Labour Party youth camp in Utoeya island.
Most of the victims from the second attack were teenagers. Shortly after the attack, he recalled the moment when his frightened victims sought cover. “Some of them are completely paralysed. They cannot run. They stand totally still. This is something they never show on TV,” Breivik said at the time.
“And there were two persons who were curled up and I think I ran out of ammunition and they knew that but they just stood there, paralysed. They were screaming, begging for their lives.” After spending just 13 years behind bars, he is applying for parole. On Tuesday, he will plead his case during the hearing at the high-security prison where he is held.
He first became eligible to seek parole after serving the first ten years of his term. However, he was rejected in 2022 after failing to convince the judge he is no longer dangerous. At the time the district court said: “The risk of violence is real and significant and equal to what it was when (Breivik) was first sentenced.”
In a letter to the court, Andreas Hjetland, a government attorney, wrote that Breivik had so far shown himself to be unreceptive to rehabilitative work and it was “therefore difficult to imagine which major reliefs in terms of sentencing are possible and justifiable.” The court said Breivik could not be taken for his word. “His stated assurances and word of honour have little value even if he were to mean what he says at the time he says it,” the judges wrote.
Earlier this year, Breivik – Norway’s worst peacetime killer – claimed his solitary confinement since being imprisoned in 2012 amounts to inhumane treatment under the European Convention of Human Rights. But Norway’s treatment of prisoners is much more favourable than many other countries.
The mass murderer is held in a two-story complex with a kitchen, dining room and TV room with an Xbox, several armchairs and black and white pictures of the Eiffel Tower on the wall. He also has a fitness room with weights, a treadmill and a rowing machine, while three parakeets fly around the complex.
