'Never again': Norway sets up July 22 commission

Three weeks to the day after it was hit by the most murderous attacks on its soil since World War II, Norway on Friday presented a commission to determine what lessons to draw from the carnage and ensure nothing similar happens again. "Thousand of people across the country need help and care. For them, it is vital to get answers to the questions: What happened? And why did it happen?" Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told reporters. "It is also important for us as a nation. We must draw information from these terrorist attacks. The goal is for this never to happen again. The goal is more security," he added. Survivors, relatives of victims and media have asked a growing number of questions about the July 22 attacks that left 77 people dead. Criticism has especially focused on the time it took police to arrest 32-year-old rightwing extremist Ander Behring Breivik and halt his deadly rampage, and the intelligence service's failure to spot him during his years of preparations for the massacre. On the day of the attacks, just over an hour passed between the first desperate calls to police from Utoeya and the arrest of the killer on the island by a special unit sent from Oslo, about 40 kilometres (25 miles) away. By the time Behring Breivik was arrested, he had killed 69 people, many of them teenagers, on the island where the ruling Labour Party's youth wing was hosting a summer camp. Of course, police were already dealing with a chaotic situation, as the killer shortly before had set off a car bomb outside government offices in Oslo, killing another eight people. Behring Breivik has confessed to both attacks, insisting targeting Prime Minister Stoltenberg's Labour Party was part of a "crusade" to halt a "Muslim invasion" and multiculturalism in Europe. Facing criticism from some that a faster response might have saved lives, Norwegian police have been forced to explain their handling of the Utoeya massacre, including why they set off for the island on a boat instead of a helicopter and why they for "tactical" reasons did not take the shortest route to the scene of the carnage. Norwegian intelligence service PST has also been called on to clarify whether it had paid enough attention to extremist groups and individuals, especially in light of a report published earlier this year in which it concluded that "rightwing and leftwing extremists groups do not represent a serious threat." PST chief Janne Kristiansen has already tried to defuse the criticism, insisting after the attacks that Behring Breivik was a "lone wolf" who "even the Stasi (secret police) in East Germany would not have detected." Behring Breivik had been reported to the PST in March after he purchased a small amount of chemicals from a Polish firm, but the agency deemed the matter harmless and did not follow up. "We need an overview of all the things that worked well, ... but also of all that did not work well, openly and without embellishment," Stoltenberg said. The 10-member commission, which has not been tasked to probe the attacks but simply to go through them and evaluate the response, will be headed by lawyer Alexandra Bech Gjoerv. Two former police officers, a former intelligence service chief, a doctor, an international terrorism expert and a communications professor figure among the commission members. The commission will begin work immediately and is scheduled to complete its evaluation by August 10, 2012.