Killer’s fate hinges on his sanity ruling

— Norwegian prosecutors said Thursday that doubts about Anders Behring Breivik’s mental state mean he should be sent to a psychiatric institution instead of prison for the deaths of 77 people in a July 22 bomb and shooting rampage.

Ultimately, it’s up to the Oslo district court to decide whether Breivik is criminally insane when it presents its ruling, expected a month after the trial ends today. Breivik insists he is sane and that he carried out the attacks for political reasons.

Either way, the 33-year-old will likely be locked up for most, if not all, of his life.

“I still think Breivik is clearly sane and that his rhetoric, attitudes and behavior don’t differ notably from other terrorists,” said Usman Rana, a Norwegian-born Muslim of Pakistani origin who writes a newspaper column.

Rana said he doubted the psychiatric dimension would have been so prominent if the perpetrator had been an Islamist extremist.

The image of global terrorism was jolted when the blond, blue-eyed gunman surrendered to police after slaughtering 69 people at the governing Labor Party’s summer youth camp. Hours earlier, he had set off a bomb in Oslo’s governing district, killing eight.

Breivik immediately admitted to the attacks and called them justified. The leftist Labor Party, in power for much of the postwar era, had betrayed the country by allowing Muslim aliens to settle in Norway, he said.

That kind of rhetoric is not uncommon among rightist fanatics in Europe, but Breivik didn’t belong to any known extremist group.

He claimed to be a commander of a militant network of “Knights Templar,” but investigators found no trace of it.

Even when presented with evidence to the contrary, Breivik insisted the group is real with such conviction that he must actually have believed in it, prosecutor Svein Holden said.

“On the background of Breivik’s intense defense of these obviously false claims, we believe it’s hard to conclude that it’s an intentional lie on his part,” Holden said.

The defense is likely to rebut the insanity finding today, the last day of the 10-week trial. Before leaving the courtroom Thursday, Breivik defiantly flashed a clenched-fist salute for the first time since the first week of the trial.

A poll by research firm Norstat released Thursday by Norwegian public broadcaster NRK showed 74 percent of Norwegians believe Breivik was mentally competent to be sentenced to prison. Ten percent said he was criminally insane, while the rest were undecided in the June 12-19 survey of 1,000 people. The margin of error was about 3 percentage points.

Prosecutors said their decision was based on Norwegian rules stating that defendants cannot be sentenced to prison if there is reasonable doubt about their mental health.

“When the court interprets the current rules, what people think cannot be of any relevance,” prosecutor Inga Bejer Engh said after the hearing Thursday.

“When this case has been legally decided, we can sitdown and have a discussion: Are the rules we have out of phase with the people?”

She also said people shouldn’t worry about Breivik getting out any sooner if he’s sent to a mental institution rather than a prison.

Front Section, Pages 3 on 06/22/2012

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