OSLO, (Reuters) – Anders Behring Breivik was sane when he killed 77 people in attacks he saw as punishing pro-immigration “traitors” in Norway, a psychiatric team said on Tuesday, contradicting a prior report that found him psychotic.
The new report could give judges grounds to sentence Breivik to prison instead of a psychiatric facility.
Breivik himself has insisted he is mentally stable and demanded that his attacks – the most violent in Norway since World War Two – be judged as political militancy and not the work of a deranged mind.
Breivik, 33, has admitted detonating a bomb that killed eight people at government headquarters in Oslo on July 22, then massacring 69 people with gunfire at a Labour Party summer camp. Most of the camp victims were teenagers. His trial on terrorism and murder charges is scheduled to start in Oslo next week and last 10 weeks.
“We’re talking about psychosis, and we have found no evidence of it,” psychiatrist Asgar Aspaas told reporters after submitting the 310-page report based on weeks of round-the-clock observation.
Aspaas was one of two experts appointed to provide a second opinion after a previous team using different methods found Breivik to be a psychotic who also suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. The initial finding caused a public uproar.
“It’s a completely open question now,” said Jo Martin Stigen, a University of Oslo law professor. “I don’t think we can rule out that he will be considered legally sane in the end.”
The duelling psychiatric teams are expected to defend their diagnoses in court, which is unusual in Norway. The final ruling will be made by a five-judge panel as part of its verdict at the end of the trial.
