The following summary account of the Oslo and Utøya terror attacks is adapted from the presentation by Norwegian journalist Kjetil Stormark, author of When Terror Hit Norway: 189 Minutes That Shocked the World and Private E-Mails of a Mass Murderer. The latter book contains a selection of messages sent from Anders Behring Breivik’s e-mail accounts before the attacks and additional messages expressing both support and condemnation that were sent to him shortly after his arrest. The former, as Stormark told the ACIA meeting, “is a timeline account based on more than 120 in-depth interviews with everyone from the staff surrounding the study of the prime minister to the people struggling for their lives at Utøya, and telling the tale of what happened through the eyes of those individuals.” It also tells what Stormark calls “the hidden story about what actually went wrong in the Norwegian emergency response on that particular day.”
Stormark, parenthetically, was in New York, as press counselor for Norway’s United Nations delegation, at the time of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States.
