Norway cops: Suspect weighed other targets

OSLO -- The anti-Muslim extremist who admitted carrying out a bombing and youth camp massacre that killed 77 people in Norway told investigators he also considered attacking other targets linked to the government or the prime minister's Labor Party, police said yesterday.

During a 10-hour questioning session, Anders Behring Breivik asked interrogators how many people he had killed in the July 22 attacks and "showed no emotion" when they told him, police attorney Paal-Fredrik Hjort Kraby told reporters in Oslo.

The Norwegian has admitted setting off a car bomb that killed eight people in downtown Oslo, then gunning down scores of youths from the left-leaning Labor Party at their annual retreat on an island northwest of the capital. Sixty-nine of them died.

Kraby said Breivik, 32, had considered other targets as he planned what Norway's Police Security Service has described as a meticulously prepared attack by a lone culprit.

"The other targets were government and Labor Party targets," Kraby said.

He declined to confirm a report in Norwegian tabloid VG saying Breivik had described the Royal Palace and the Labor Party's head office as potential targets. The paper did not cite its sources.

"They were targets that one would say are natural for terror attacks," Kraby said.

In a 1,500-page manifesto released before the attacks, Breivik ranted against Muslims and a left-wing political elite he claims is destroying Europe's cultural heritage by allowing unfettered immigration.

Norwegian authorities say he wasn't in their database of right-wing extremists and appears to have prepared his attacks for years without telling anyone. They haven't found anything to support his claims of being part of a militant network of modern-day crusaders plotting a series of coups d'etats across Europe.

Once-homogenous Norway has become increasingly diverse in recent decades. More than 12 percent of the 5 million residents are immigrants or children of immigrants. About half of the immigrants come from Asia, Africa or Latin America, according to the national statistics office.

Worries about immigration have fueled the rise of the Progress Party, a right-wing opposition group that is now the No. 2 party in Parliament, after Labor. Party officials have confirmed that Breivik used to be a member. In his manifesto, he says he left the group because he thought they were too moderate.