Shoe thrown at mass-killer Breivik during Norway trial

PanARMENIAN.Net - A brother of one of the victims of Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik threw a shoe at him in court on Friday, May 11 the first time the trial has been interrupted by a public outburst, Reuters reported.

"Go to hell, go to hell, you killed my brother," the man screamed from the second row of the public gallery as he hurled the shoe at Breivik a few meters (yards) away, newspaper VG reported on its website.

The shoe missed Breivik but struck his co-defense lawyer, Vibeke Hein Baera, who was seated closest to the public gallery, during the presentation of an autopsy report.

Some in the courtroom applauded, or uttered the word "finally", and others started to cry. The shoe thrower was removed by police. Police numbers were boosted in the court after the incident.

"If anyone wants to throw something, you can throw at me when I'm entering or leaving the court," Breivik was quoted by local media as saying after the incident. "Don't throw things at my lawyers."

The incident came during a week of harrowing testimony from survivors of Breivik's gun rampage across the small island of Utoeya last July, where the ruling Labour Party was holding a youth camp. He killed 69 people there, many of them teenagers.

He has admitted the killings, but denies criminal responsibility. He says he was defending Norwegian ethnic purity from Muslim immigration and the multiculturalism backed by the Labour Party.

Ahead of the trial, one court-appointed team of psychiatrists concluded that Breivik was psychotic, while a second found him mentally capable.

Breivik has said he should either be executed or acquitted, calling the prospect of a prison sentence "pathetic" and an insanity ruling "worse than death". If he is deemed sane, he could face a 21-year prison sentence with indefinite extensions for as long as he is considered dangerous.