On Friday 22 July 2011, Norway was hit by two terrorist attacks. The bomb attack on the government quarter and the mass murder on Utøya are the worst acts of terrorism in Norway since the Second World War. The attack was politically motivated.
The perpetrator wanted to hit the state, the Labor Party and the party's youth in AUF.
At the AUF camp on Utøya in the Tyrifjord, 69 people were killed. 32 of those killed on the island were under the age of 18. The two youngest were only 14 years old. It took just over an hour from the time the police received information about the shots on the island until the perpetrator was arrested.
There were a total of 564 people on Utøya when the terrorist attacked. 495 survived by hiding in buildings, under dead friends, on mountain slopes or by swimming ashore.
The perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, is serving a sentence of 21 years in prison. In court, Breivik admitted to having committed the murders, but he pleaded not guilty.
If I remember correctly, the police failed to arrive quickly because he bombed a government building in central Oslo.
When they did arrive to the general area, they found out that the amount of equipment they had to bring with them caused them to exceed the weight limit of the boat they used which in turn flooded the engine with water.
To add to the series of unfortunate events and general incompetence, they were forced to travel 3.6 km to the island instead of the planned 600m, adding delays to their arrival.
I remember the days after the attacks as I couldn't attend school due to many of the teachers losing their children at Utøya. Many of the teachers I had resigned as they couldn't bear the weight of lost family.
It still messes with me even though I was 6 or 7 when this happened, and wasn't directly affected.
I can't think of how much pain those parents had to have endured
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