Terrorists on Trial De Graaf, Beatrice, Schmid, Alex P
Terrorists on Trial De Graaf, Beatrice, Schmid, Alex P. Published by Leiden University Press De Graaf, Beatrice and Alex P. Schmid. Terrorists on Trial: A Performative Perspective. first ed. Leiden University Press, 0. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/46327. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/46327 [ Access provided at 15 Apr 2020 10:35 GMT from Utrecht Universiteit ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 11. Performing Justice, Coping with Trauma: The Trial of Anders Breivik, 2012 Tore Bjørgo, Beatrice de Graaf, Liesbeth van der Heide, Cato Hemmingby and Daan Weggemans 11.1. Introduction The sophistication behind the attacks, the extreme brutality, the number of victims and the fact that 33 of the 77 people killed were under the age of 18, made the 22 July 2011 attacks in Norway one of the major terrorist incidents in the history of terrorism. Compared to other acts of terrorism conducted by a single actor, they were unique in their destructiveness. The subsequent trial was also unique for the Norwegian judicial system and court administration. At the same time, this was also a highly dramatic and explicit example of a terrorist suspect’s attempt to turn his trial into a theatre. In the 1,500-page manifesto that Anders Behring Breivik posted on the internet, he wrote ‘your trial will offer you a stage to the world’.1 In addition, the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang published extracts of a letter Breivik sent from his cell in which he stated that the court case looked like a circus; ‘it is an absolutely unique opportunity to explain the idea of 2083 [the manifesto] to the world’.2 He described the attacks in Oslo and Utøya as only the first part of his ‘operation’.
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