Oslo Suspect Cultivated Parallel Life to Disguise ‘Martyrdom Operation’

When Anders Behring Breivik was not plotting mass murder and fine-tuning the bomb he detonated here last week, he was busy playing video games and blogging, listening to Euro pop and watching episodes of “True Blood” — except on Sunday nights, when he usually dined with his mother.

It was a parallel life he maintained meticulously in recent years. Former classmates and colleagues described him as unremarkable and easy to forget, qualities, perhaps inborn, that he cultivated — consciously, he would say — to mask his dedication to what he called his “martyrdom operation.”