Norway killer says he was a nice person

THE Norwegian anti-Muslim fanatic who killed 77 people in a shooting and bombing rampage last July told a court on Friday he was basically a “nice person” who had trained himself to stifle his emotions so he could carry out the attacks.Anders Behring Breivik, 33, admits killing eight people with a car bomb at government headquarters in Oslo, then gunning down 69 people, most of them teenagers, at a Labour Party summer camp on Utoeya island.But he has pleaded not guilty, insisting he was defending the country against waves of Muslim immigration facilitated by the political left.Breivik said he began consciously training to cut his range of feelings five years before the attacks, when he began to consider using violence to alert Europeans to what he considered the loss of their culture.“One might say that I was quite normal until 2006 when I started training, when I commenced de-emotionalising,” he told the court. “And many people will describe me as a nice person or a sympathetic, caring person to friends and anyone.”“I’ve had a dehumanisation strategy towards those I considered valid targets so I could come to the point of killing them,” he said, testifying on the fifth day of his trial.Breivik’s matter-of-fact manner as he delivers his account of the worst peacetime killings in Norway’s modern history has chilled his countrymen.His legal team has said that Friday’s testimony would be harrowing, focusing on the systematic slaughter. The presiding judge told people attending the trial they were free to leave the courtroom at any time.