for <em>Aftonbladet</em>
22 July, 2011
A massive rescue operation.
Niclas Hammarström
Niclas Hammarström was born in Sweden in 1969. When he was 14, he started to take pictures at the Solvalla horserace track. He later studied photography in Stockholm. After his s...
Utøya, Norway
A massive rescue operation is underway, following a gunman opening fire on youths on Utøya island , in Norway. On 22 July, Anders Behring Breivik (32) killed 69 people on the small island of Utøya, 40 kilometers northwest of Oslo, in Norway. The shootings formed the second of two sequential attacks, the first being a car-bomb explosion in the government quarter of the capital, which killed eight people and injured 92. The Utøya incident took place less than two hours later. The island is the site of an annual summer camp organized by the youth division of the Norwegian Labor Party. Breivik gained access by posing as a police officer who had come to conduct a routine check following the Oslo bombing. He went on to shoot indiscriminately, killing and injuring people around the island and firing on those who jumped into the water in an attempt to escape.
Local police did not have a helicopter appropriate for transporting groups of officers, and could not find a suitable boat to reach the island. When anti-terror police arrived from Oslo, they were eventually carried over to Utøya on civilian craft, reaching the island an hour after the first shots had been fired. Breivik was arrested, and later put on terrorist charges for both attacks. Breivik, who admitted carrying out both the bombing and the shooting, had been preparing for the attacks for a number of years, and had distributed a manifesto outlining his extremist beliefs.
