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BREIVIK

Mass killer Breivik moved to different jail

Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway last July, has been temporarily transferred to another prison while work is done on the facility he is normally held at, a prison official said Tuesday.

Mass killer Breivik moved to different jail
Photo: Erik Schrøder/Scanpix

"This transfer is mainly due to construction inside the prison and to planning needs among the personnel," said Knut Bjarkeid, the warden of Ila prison near Oslo where Breivik has largely been held since his arrest on July 22nd shortly after carrying out his twin attacks.

"We have asked for a break," he said, noting that occasionally moving high-profile inmates to other prisons can be beneficial to policy development.

How long the 33-year-old right-wing extremist would stay at the Skien prison, some 130 kilometres south-east of Oslo, remained unclear, he said.

Norway on Sunday marked the one-year anniversary of the July 22nd 2011 attacks.

On that day, Breivik first bombed a government building in Oslo, killing eight people, before going on a more than hour-long shooting rampage on the nearby island of Utøya, where the ruling Labour Party's youth wing was hosting a summer camp.

He killed 69 people on the island, most of them teenagers.

Breivik's 10-week trial ended on June 22nd, and his verdict is expected on August 24th

Regardless of whether he is found criminally sane and sentenced to prison or criminally insane and sent to a closed psychiatric ward, Breivik is likely to be mainly held at Ila.

The high-security prison has already converted one wing so it can be used as a miniature hospital.

The killer will in any case be held apart from the other inmates and should benefit from a number of measures to ease his isolation.   

Last May, Bjarkeid told Norwegian media the prison was for instance looking into the possibility of hiring people to play sports and chess with Breivik.

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BREIVIK

Norway mosque shooter ‘has admitted the facts’: Police

A Norwegian man suspected of killing his step sister and opening fire in a mosque near Oslo last weekend, has admitted to the crimes though he has not officially entered a plea, police said on Friday.

Norway mosque shooter 'has admitted the facts': Police
Philip Manshaus appears in court on August 12. Photo: Cornelius Poppe / NTB Scanpix / AFP
Philip Manshaus, 21, was remanded in custody Monday, suspected of murder and a “terrorist act” that police say he filmed himself committing.
   
Answering police questions on Friday, “the suspect admits the facts but has not taken a formal position as to the charges,” Oslo police official Pal-Fredrik Hjort Kraby said in a statement.
   
Manshaus is suspected of murdering his 17-year-old step sister Johanne Zhangjia Ihle-Hansen, before entering the Al-Noor mosque in an affluent Oslo suburb and opening fire before he was overpowered by a 65-year-old man.
   
Just three worshippers were in the mosque at the time, and there were no serious injuries.
   
Manshaus appeared in court this week with two black eyes and scrapes and bruises to his face, neck and hands.
   
Police have said he has “extreme right views” and “xenophobic positions” and that he had filmed the mosque attack with a camera mounted on a helmet. He had initially denied the accusations.
   
The incident came amid a rise in white supremacy attacks around the world, including the recent El Paso massacre in the United States.
   
Norway witnessed one of the worst-ever attacks by a rightwing extremist in July 2011, when Anders Behring Breivik, who said he feared a “Muslim invasion”, killed 77 people in a truck bomb blast near government offices in Oslo and a shooting spree at a Labour Party youth camp on the island of Utøya.