OSLO, Norway — The Norwegian police on Saturday charged a man they identified as a right-wing fundamentalist Christian in connection with a bombing in central Oslo and a mass shooting on a nearby island that together killed at least 92 people.
As stunned Norwegians grappled with the deadliest attack in the country since World War II and a shocking case of homegrown terrorism, a portrait began to emerge of the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, 32, as a gun-loving, highly religious Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threat of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration to the cultural and patriotic values of his country.
"We are not sure whether he was alone or had help," a police official, Roger Andresen, said at a news conference. "What we know is that he is right-wing and a Christian fundamentalist."
The horror of the attack on a political summer camp on Utoya island, a remarkably meticulous attack on Norway's current and future political elite, also came into focus Saturday. Utoya is a wooded retreat accessible only by boat about 19 miles northwest of Oslo.
Police had arrived at the island massacre about an hour and a half after a gunman first opened fire, slowed because they didn't have quick access to a helicopter and then couldn't find a boat to make their way to the scene just several hundred yards offshore. The assailant surrendered when police reached him, but at least 85 people died before that.
Footage filmed from a helicopter that showed the gunman firing into the water added to the impression that police were slow to the scene. They chose to drive, Police Chief Sveinung Sponheim said, because their helicopter wasn't on standby.
When the tall, blond-haired man dressed in a police uniform arrived on the island he apparently beckoned unsuspecting camp-goers over to him, telling them he wanted to talk about the explosion in Oslo.
News of the blast had already reached Utoya; the retreat's leaders had called an informational meeting about it, so that attendees could call their families to make sure they were all right.
Then the gunman drew his weapons and opened fire. Campers screamed and scattered.
Adrian Pracon had been trying to swim to safety when he saw the killer point his weapon at him. "Please, no, please!" Pracon screamed. No bullet came.
Now, sprawled face down on a half-submerged rock, trying to play dead, the 21-year-old sensed the shooter standing almost directly above him, so close that he could feel the heat of the weapon. As the gunman fired at other youths lying on the island's shore, Pracon kept still — even when a shot grazed his shoulder. That apparently convinced the attacker that Pracon was already dead and to move on.
"It was as though he had done this kind of thing before, as if going around and shooting people was totally normal," Pracon told Norway's Aftenposten newspaper. "He said, 'You're all going to die.' "
Several witnesses gave accounts to news media of how the gunman would mow down bystanders in a hail of bullets, then coolly pull out his pistol to finish off the wounded and dying who lay heaped on the ground.
Police said late Saturday that they expected the death toll to climb. There were still bodies in the bombed government buildings in Oslo, where at least seven people had been confirmed dead, and at least four people were missing on Utoya.
Police said this was an "Oklahoma City-type" bombing in downtown Oslo: It targeted a government building, was allegedly perpetrated by a homegrown assailant and used the same mix of fertilizer and fuel that blew up a federal building in the U.S. in 1995.
The police also said that unexploded munitions were still in some downtown Oslo buildings, and they had not ruled out the possibility that Breivik had accomplices.
The police are working on the assumption that Breivik, having drawn security services to central Oslo when he exploded a car bomb outside government offices, traveled to Utoya island dressed as a police officer. Once there, he said he had come to check on the security of the young political campers, gathered them together and proceeded to shoot them and then hunt down those who fled.
Norwegian analysts said that right-wing groups were very small, having shrunk considerably since the 1990s, and had been quiet. Even the Progress Party, which began as an anti-tax protest and has been stridently anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim in the past, has moved more to the center, to the point that it is seen as a potential coalition partner for the Conservative Party in the 2013 general election.
Breivik had been a member of the Progress Party but quit in 2006, disappointed by its move toward moderation; his Internet postings also indicate contempt for the Conservative Party. He said it had given up a serious battle against multiculturalism, which he said was diluting the nation's character. He also criticized the government for spending too little of Norway's oil wealth at home.
Joran Kallmyr, Oslo's vice mayor for transport and a member of the Progress Party, said he met Breivik several times in 2002 and 2003 at local party meetings. "He was very quiet, almost a little bit shy," Kallmyr said. "But he was a normal person with good behavior. He never shared any extreme thoughts or speech with us. There was absolutely no reason to expect that he could do something like this. We're very shocked."
Police said Breivik had registered a farm in Rena, in eastern Norway, which the authorities said allowed him to order a large quantity of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, an ingredient that can be used to make explosives.
Earlier Friday, a farm-supply store said they had alerted police that Breivik bought six metric tons of fertilizer, which can be used in homemade bombs. That's at least one metric ton more than was found at the farm, according to police.
"This is the Norwegian equivalent to Timothy McVeigh," the right-wing American who blew up a government building in Oklahoma City in 1995, said Marcus Buck, a political scientist at the University of Tromso in northern Norway.
"This is right-wing domestic terrorism, and the big question is to what extent Norwegian agencies have diverted their attention from what they knew decades ago was the biggest threat" and instead focused on threats from militant Islamist groups.
The authorities recognized in terrorism reports as recently as March that threats could come from tiny right-wing groups, Buck said.
But the reports emphasized the dangers of radical Islam, groups opposed to Norway's participation in NATO operations in Afghanistan and now Libya, economic espionage against the country's resources and technology assets and potential threats to Norwegian dignitaries.
But Anders Romarheim, at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, said in some ways the homegrown nature of the terror made it harder. "With 9/11 in America, people could ask, 'Who are they?' and could pour their rage out on someone else. But we can't disavow this person; he's one of us. That's a sobering thought."
He added: "It was international jihadism that we feared. But what we have now is more painful in terms of a re-evaluation of ourselves."
Breivik was being questioned under the country's terrorism laws, police said, and was cooperating with the investigation.
"He has stated that it was cruel that he had to perform these actions, but in his mind it was necessary," defense attorney Geir Lippestad told reporters as he left the police station late Saturday night, Verdens Gang reported.
