Norway Court to Decide Mass Killer Breivik’s Sanity Tomorrow
A Norwegian court delivers its verdict in the ten-week trial of gunman Anders Behring Breivik on Friday, deciding whether to send the anti-Muslim militant to jail or a mental hospital for the massacre of 77 people last summer.
Prosecutors have demanded a verdict of insanity, a fate Breivik called “worse than death”, while many of his victims say only a sane person could have carried out such a complex attack. Either way he is likely to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
“He has made it clear that if he is convicted as legally insane, he will appeal the decision,” Geir Lippestad, Breivik’s defence lawyer, said on Thursday. “If he is convicted as sane, he will accept that.”
Breivik detonated a fertilizer bomb outside a government building that included the prime ministerial offices last July, killing eight, then gunned down 69 people, mostly teenagers at the ruling Labour Party’s youth camp on Utoeya island.