SOMALI YOUTH FOR PEACE: Scores killed in twin attacks on Norway

Friday, July 22, 2011

Scores killed in twin attacks on Norway

AL Jazeera Europe

At least 87 people dead after a youth camp on an island is fired upon and a massive bomb blast hits central Oslo.

Last Modified: 22 Jul 2011 23:21

At least 87 people have been killed in two attacks in Norway.
A gunman dressed in police uniform opened fire at a youth camp on Utoya island, killing at least 80 people, hours after a bomb killed seven people in the government district in the capital Oslo.
"The updated knowledge we are sitting on now is at least 80," police chief Oystein Maeland said of the attack in Utoya.
"We can't guarantee that [number] won't increase somewhat," he added, saying that some of the wounded were badly injured.
Maeland said the attack in Utoya, located outside Oslo, had reached "catastrophic dimensions".
A 32-year-old Norwegian has been arrested after the shooting incident on Friday; police also linked him to the Oslo bombing.

Norway's public broadcaster, NRK, named the bombing and shooting suspect as Anders Breivik.
The TV2 televison station reported, without disclosing its sources, that the detained man had links to right-wing extremism. He was described as tall and blond.
Police searched a flat in west Oslo where the man lived, and evacuated some neighbours.
The attack on the youth camp happened two hours after the Oslo bomb blast. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for either of the attacks. Anti-terrorism police were deployed to restore order.
"I saw young people running around, jumping into the water," Kristine Melby, who lives across the narrow channel on the Norwegian mainland, told Al Jazeera. "We heard people screaming."

The explosion in the Norwegian capital, which took place at 3:20pm local time, blew out most of the windows of a 17-storey building housing Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's office in the city centre.
It also damaged nearby ministries, including the finance and oil ministry, which was on fire.

Prime minister defiant
"I have a message to the one who attacked us and those who were behind this," Stoltenberg said in a televised news conference. "No one will bomb us to silence, no one will shoot us to silence."

He declined to speculate on who had been involved.
Stoltenberg was safe and was not in his office at the time of the blast, officials said.

Al Jazeera's Jonah Hull described Oslo as a city "mostly shut down [and] extremely quiet".

In Video

Justin Crump, a security analyst, discusses the deadly attacks in Oslo and Utoya

"One gets the sense that it is really vastly changed in character [after the attacks]," he said.
"The bars are closed; the restaurants are closesd; not many people are about on what would have been a busy Friday."

He said there were many unaswered questions "chief among them, of course, why Norway? Why this happened?"

Earlier, Peter Svaar, a journalist working for NRK, said "the whole of downtown Oslo is sealed off" and spoke of a "very chaotic situation".
Hanne Taalsen, a journalist working for TV2, told Al Jazeera the blast caused "massive damage in the streets" around the government buildings.

The TV station's building was later cordoned off amid reports that there was a suspicious package inside.

Newspaper offices in the area were also damaged and smoke could be seen drifting in the streets.
"People are really surprised. I am very surprised. People are shocked that this could happen in Oslo," Taalsen told Al Jazeera.
"People are quite calm, they are not running around or anything. But people are quite shocked. I think most Norwegians consider themselves to be outside of incidents like this."

Jakub Godzimirski, a senior research fellow at the Norwegian institute of International affairs, said the attacks were more likely the work of a right-winger than an Islamist group.
"It would be very odd for Islamists to have a local political angle. The attack on the Labour youth meeting suggests it's something else," he said.
"If Islamists wanted to attack, they could have set off a bomb in a nearby shopping mall rather than a remote island. "This attack has more in common with the Oklahoma City bombing than an Islamist attack."
Right-wing groups have generated sporadic attacks in other countries, including the United States. In 1995, 168 people were killed when Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb at a federal building in Oklahoma City.

A Google map depicts Oslo's central district which was devastated by Friday's bomb blast