Daily Times

Right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik made a Nazi salute and held up racist messages on Tuesday as he asked for parole, a request widely expected to be denied just 10 years after carrying out Norway’s deadliest peacetime attack. Wearing a black suit, white shirt and beige tie, Breivik, 42, appeared before the district court in the southern region of Telemark, convened for security reasons in the gymnasium of the Skien prison where he is incarcerated. He lifted his arm in a Nazi salute to the three judges as they entered the room. The families of his victims had expressed fears Breivik would use the three-day hearing, which is being broadcast almost live, as a platform for his political views, and have called for him to be deprived of the attention he is seeking. Breivik wore a note pinned to his lapel reading “Stop your genocide against our white nations”. The message was also taped to his briefcase, and he held up signs bearing the message during the prosecutor’s opening remarks, which head judge Dag Bjorvik asked him to put away.

In 2012 Breivik, who killed 77 people during the massacre, got 21 years in prison, which can be extended indefinitely as long as he is considered a threat to society. At the time, that was Norway’s harshest sentence, though the law has since been changed to allow for the possibility of handing down longer jail terms. He had to serve at least 10 years before he could make his first request for conditional release.

On July 22, 2011, Breivik killed eight people when he set off a truck bomb near government offices in Oslo, then gunned down 69 others, most of them teenagers, at a summer camp for the Labour party youth wing on the island of Utoya. He said he killed his victims because they embraced multiculturalism.