CAIRO: On Tuesday morning, a report on the mental health of mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik was handed in to the Oslo district court. Much anticipated, the report was to state the mental health of the 32-old man who brutally gunned down 77 youngsters in Norway this summer. After 13 hours of intense conversations with Breivik and evaluations on police interrogations, two court psychiatrists concluded that Breivik was psychotic at the moment of the crime, and that he is not fit for sentence. “We haven't been in doubt. Now it is up to the court to evaluate our conclusions during the trial,” one of the psychiatrists, Torgeir Husby, said early Monday. Reactions from politicians and the Norwegian public to the results of the report have been strong, as the case is highly emotional to Norway. ”I will have to ask the government to get another evaluation from the psychiatrists,” politician Per Sandberg from the conservative Fremskrittspartiet said shortly after the press conference on the report. “We can't accept the report as it is now. The victims must be secured that he will not be let out right away,” he added. Breivik has been evaluated by several psychologists prior to this. The most recent evaluation suggested that Breivik was suffering from a so-called “narrow gauge psychosis” which was stated to be closely connected to his “intense hatred for immigrants.” However, this prior report would not have seen him excused from prosecution. The surprising conclusion of the present report deems Breivik to have been too mentally unstable to be held judicially responsible for his actions. The appointed court psychiatrists state that Breivik “both in the planning and exercising of the killings, as well as in conversations with the present psychiatrists, have been psychotic.” “This comes as a total surprise, as we understood his crime to have been very well-planned and calculated,” a representative of the Norwegian police said minutes before the press conference on the report staged today at 1 in police headquarters, in Grønland, Norway. In the process of dealing with the horror of what happened at the islands of Utøya this July, the Norwegian public has been discussing what made Breivik the murderer he had become. With its 230 pages, the conclusive report on the mental health of Breivik is the longest one seen in Norwegian legal history, and was expected to bring some answers to the speculations. Though the report is considered confidential, sources have leaked several points from the psychiatrists' evaluations. Before the press conference on the matter had been staged Tuesday, un-named sources confirmed to the Norwegian State Radio (NRK) that the report heavily implies that Breivik was sexually abused as a child. Not going into details, individuals close to the family have additionally stated to NRK that “Breivik had a terrible childhood.” On the 22 July, Breivik detonated a bomb in the governmental area of the Norwegian capital Oslo, and eight people were killed. Subsequently, he went on to the little island of Utøya, where the youth department of the Working Party were having their summer camp. Here he shot 69 people, mostly young political active members of the party, to death. In his manifesto, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, which was e-mailed to 1,003 addresses about 90 minutes before the bomb blast in Oslo, he states his grounds for the attacks. His main motive was stated to rid Norway of a political party which he understood as ruining his country due to their relatively soft approach to immigration. Meant as an ideological justification of the attacks, the manifesto document has been deemed a clear example of the current European trend of right-wing politics. Slamming arguments that Breivik's statements and actions were isolated, Slovenian philosopher, writer and debater Slavoj Zizek wrote on the manifest that it was ”… not a case of a deranged man's rambling; it is simply a consequent exposition of “Europe's crisis.” If Breivik is declared sick by the Norwegian Court, he cannot be sentenced, but will instead be ordered psychiatric detention. BM
