OSLO, Norway — Confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik belongs in psychiatric care instead of prison, Norwegian prosecutors said Tuesday after a mental evaluation declared him legally insane during a bomb-and-shooting rampage that killed 77 people.

The court-ordered assessment found that the self-styled anti-Muslim militant was psychotic during the July 22 attacks, which would make him mentally unfit to be convicted and imprisoned for the country’s worst peacetime massacre.

The report, written by two psychiatrists who spent 36 hours talking to Breivik, will be reviewed by an expert panel before the Oslo district court rules on his mental state.

Their conclusions surprised many outside experts and contrasted with earlier comments by the head of the review panel, who said in July that it was unlikely that Breivik would be declared insane because the attacks were so carefully planned and executed.

But prosecutors said the psychiatric report describes a man living in a “delusional universe” – a paranoid schizophrenic who has lost touch with reality.

“After having read the documents of the case, the conclusion did not come as a surprise,” Prosecutor Svein Holden said.

Advertisement

Breivik, 32, has confessed to setting off a bomb that killed eight people in Oslo’s government district, then opening fire at the summer camp of the governing Labor Party’s youth wing. Sixty-nine people died in the mayhem at the Utoya island camp outside the Norwegian capital of Oslo before Breivik surrendered to a SWAT team.

He denies criminal guilt, saying he’s a commander of a movement aiming to overthrow European governments and replace them with regimes that will deport Muslim immigrants.

Investigators have found no sign of such a movement and say Breivik likely plotted and carried out the attacks on his own.

Breivik was told about the evaluation later Tuesday, police prosecutor Christian Hatlo said.

“He said he was insulted by the conclusion, and wanted to read the report,” Hatlo said, adding that Breivik wasn’t allowed to read the full report.

In an online manifesto released just before the attacks, Breivik wrote that he expected authorities to label him an “insane, inbred, pedophile Nazi loser.”

Holden said the report concluded that Breivik during an extended period had “developed the mental disorder of paranoid schizophrenia, which has changed him and made him into the person he is today.”

Breivik’s lawyer Geir Lippestad told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that he wasn’t surprised by the psychiatric assessment.

 


Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.

Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.