OSLO – Norwegian killer Anders Behring Breivik felt horrified by his actions when he began to methodically shoot young people dead, a psychologist was quoted as saying Friday.
The police psychologist supervising Breivik's interrogation said the killer had provided chilling details of the massacre at a Norwegian Labour Party summer camp on Utoya island, where he killed 69 of his 77 victims.
"He says it was very difficult ... it was horrifying at first on Utoya, the first executions," Superintendent Asbjorn Rachlew told The (London) Times. Breivik has since indicated that he was pleased that his acts of violence had succeeded, according to Rachlew.
"He was not looking forward to the day of the operation because he knew it was going to be hard. But he had a mission. There was a lot of planning. It was hard work and it succeeded. He has a satisfaction that all his preparations, all his determination, ended in success."
According to Breivik's lawyer, the killer spared two youths on Utoya because they looked too young.
"He believes the two were between 14 and 16 years old. I will not go into more detail than that," defense counsel Geir Lippestad told NRK, Norway's public broadcaster.
Police said blood tests showed that Breivik, 32, was under the influence of steroids and other drugs at the time of the attacks.
Rachlew, a former murder detective, is advising a rotating team of three interrogators while he watches from another room at the central police station in Oslo. So far, Breivik has undergone more than 40 hours of questioning in five day-long sessions.
"Confession is not our goal. Our goal is gathering information," Rachlew said. "We look upon Breivik as our key witness because nobody knows the case better than he does. We say, 'You now have the opportunity to give your account and we will listen to you.'
"Right now, we need professional trust between him and us. As long as he keeps talking about relevant information, we feel we are doing our job. He responds to our open-ended questions. We tell him that we need information down to the very last detail. He is trying really hard to provide us with all the details he can."
Breivik is still refusing to provide any information about his claim that there are other terrorist cells in Norway and around Europe. But he has dropped his insistence that he will speak only to Japanese psychologists because he believes they will better understand his concept of honor. He is cooperating with a psychological evaluation by two independent Norwegian experts.
