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It was Bjorn Ihler’s third trip to the peaceful wooded island of Utøya, in Norway’s Lake Tyrifjorden, when he was shot at by the terrorist, Anders Breivik.
The 20-year-old had stayed up late with friends the night before, enjoyed waffles for breakfast and was starting his day at the annual summer camp of the Worker’s Youth League (AUF), the youth wing of the Norwegian Labour Party, when people started chatting anxiously about an apparent attack in the capital.
‘Everyone on the island gathered in the main meeting space and we were told there had been an explosion in Oslo.
‘We pulled up pictures from our phones and it looked pretty substantial, like pictures we’d seen from 9/11,’ Bjorn, 35, remembers of July 22, 2011.
Norway was not accustomed to terrorist attacks, and no one on that tranquil spot could have foreseen the horror that was about to be unleashed.
That day, Utøya became the site of the deadliest lone-wolf terrorist attack in history.
A 950kg homemade car bomb had been detonated outside the Prime Minister’s office, killing eight people and devastating the building.
To quell concern, leaders told campers they were in one of the safest places on earth. Barbecues were lit, and sweets and fizzy drinks were handed out.
It was a decoy. Breivik, then 32 years old, had sent the emergency services to the capital so, dressed in a rudimentary police uniform, he could arrive on the island and start his killing spree unhindered.
‘After the meeting, my friends and I went out to the camping area to work out if any of our friends or family had been in the area of the Oslo attack, when we heard popping sounds, like fireworks,’ Bjorn tells Metro over Zoom from his home in rural Sweden.
‘The campsite is in a crater in the middle of the island and I saw a man walk over the ridge in dark clothes with guns. People were running towards him and he shot them straight down.
‘Then he turned and started shooting at the group I was in and we ran into the forest.’
The campers hid in woodland, headed for boats or made a desperate swim to safety across the cold, perilous fjord. Desperate, they contacted their parents or sent tweets and Facebook alerts to share the gravity of the situation, with one posting: ‘Please tell the police to hurry.’
Bjorn, meanwhile, had taken cover among the trees and called his father for advice before trying to escape the gunman’s path, picking up the eight-year-old son of one of the island’s security guards on the way. He hid with the child before hearing approaching gunshots.
‘A group of people came running through our hiding spot, including another eight-year-old child. So I took the two kids and ran with them through the woods and onto a track.’
‘I was pretty terrified, but also fairly present in the moment. I was making decisions about where we could be and our safety.
‘At one point we ran into a place where Breivik had been and had executed several people.’
Bjorn doesn’t know what happened next. He ‘blacked out’, but later found himself on the southern tip of the island, where he heard a media helicopter overhead and saw a line of blue flashing lights from ambulances on the mainland.
Bjorn believed the ordeal was about to end and gave his phone to the children so they could call their mothers, before calling his own father again.
Spotting a police officer walking towards him, he felt a huge rush of relief. Little did Bjorn know it was in fact Breivik, who had disguised himself as an officer to trick security guards into believing he was there for added protection following the bombing.
‘He came out from the bushes behind us, and he said they’d caught the bad guy. As I was conveying that to my father, he started shooting at our group, so I jumped into the water,’ Bjorn recalled.
‘My phone died and the last thing my father heard was that the police were here.’
With the children he was protecting following him into the lake, Bjorn still wasn’t safe. He was wearing a woolly jumper that weighed him down in the water, and as he stopped to remove it, Breivik took aim and fired straight at him.
‘For a moment I was like: “This is it.” And I came to terms with that.’
Breivik missed, and Bjorn and the children made their way around the headland, hiding under bushes overhanging the lake.
After his 72-minute killing-spree Breivik was finally arrested, and only when he was sure that the gunshots had stopped did Bjorn make his way back onto land.
‘The kids’ lips had turned blue and they were pretty cold from the water. We climbed back up onto the island, and from there could see the bodies. We tried to discourage the children from looking.’
Breivik had murdered 69 people, including the two boys’ fathers. His youngest victim was 14.
As Bjorn and others cautiously emerged from their hiding places, they found a landscape of devastation. Eyewitnesses recalled bodies scattered along footpaths, on the shoreline and where people had sought cover.
Abandoned shoes, phones, rucksacks and other belongings lay scattered.
Doctors and nurses on site treated gunshot wounds, alongside hypothermia among those who had hidden in the fjords, before the injured were taken to hospital. Norway, and the rest of the world, reeled with shock.
‘There was a sense of, how can a person from our society create this kind of havoc and harbour this kind of hate? How can Norwegian society produce someone like this?’ historian and political scientist Matthew Feldman tells Metro.
‘It was the worst lone wolf terrorist attack in history. He put together a 1,500-page manifesto, and devoted years to this plan of killing his fellow citizens, a large proportion of whom were children shot at close range,’ he adds.
‘Norway hadn’t seen the kind of conflict that other Western countries had. It was a real scales-falling-from-the-eyes moment.’
On the outside, Breivik seemed like a normal, well-adjusted man. Even the police officers who interrogated him after the attack commented on how polite and mild-mannered he was.
He came from an affluent suburb of west Oslo, was middle class and well educated, but lived alone with his mother and spent a great deal of time online, where he became radicalised and consumed by racist hate.
Though Breivik worked alone, his horrific murders were a call to action, with his manifesto acting as a blueprint for others driven by anti-Muslim hate. He had targeted the AUF because he saw its members as ‘traitors’ for promoting multiculturalism.
‘It became the first manifesto that was picked up, plagiarised and used by others. One of the things that made it so dangerous was that it explained how to make a fertiliser bomb, right down to the instructions and the recipes,’ Matthew explains.
‘It provided a kind of do-it-yourself manual for other lone wolf terrorists. He was bigger, more deadly, more methodical than other attackers and arguably left behind more breadcrumbs for other people to follow.’
In August 2012, Breivik was convicted on 77 counts of premeditated murder and sentenced to 21 years behind bars with ‘forvaring’, or indefinite extensions.
It was the maximum sentence allowed by the Norwegian justice system. Although Breivik could be released by 2033, the court can indefinitely extend the sentence in five-year increments.
At a rejected parole hearing four years ago, Breivik flashed Nazi salutes in court. As he has never distanced himself from his racist ideology or expressed any remorse, he is likely to be considered an ongoing threat to society and remain incarcerated.
‘I’m not seeing a future where he gets out of jail,’ Bjorn says.
Breivik is now in the high-security Ringerike Prison and, in order to protect himself and others, and to prevent him from radicalising other inmates, he is kept largely alone. He is housed in a two-storey section including a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen, a gym, TV room, access to computer games and an outdoor courtyard with a basketball hoop.
Fifteen years on, Breivik’s legacy remains, and his manifesto influenced both the mosque attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand and the synagogue shooting in Poway, near San Diego, both in 2019.
In the weeks and months after the attack, Bjorn suffered from flashbacks, poor sleep and stress triggered by loud noises.
‘I don’t think “recovered” is a word I will ever use. It’s more about learning to live with it, and at this point I feel mentally healthy. The experience is still there, but it is just part of the tapestry,’ he explains.
‘I’m not only a survivor of this attack but, at this point, I have 15 years’ professional experience working against terrorism. That was an hour and some minutes of my life, but most of my life is what comes after, and that’s where the impact is.’
Bjorn is still in occasional contact with fellow survivors, and will sometimes attend memorial events, but this year he will mark the anniversary quietly with his wife, probably taking a long walk in the woods with their dog Rnjoa.
He has gone on to dedicate his life to fighting extremism and now runs the Kalifa Ihler Institute, an international organisation shaping global policy and conversations in the fight for peace, liberty and equality. He also runs Revontulet, which carries out threat intelligence mapping and monitors extremist networks.
‘After the attack, I tried really hard to understand how Breivik had become who he was. I read the manifesto and went on a journey around the world for several years, meeting former extremists and trying to figure out how this could happen.
‘But one of the things I learned was that it doesn’t really make sense, and trying to make sense of it might not be the best approach, either to prevent future attacks or for my own healing,’ says Bjorn.
‘So it’s become more important for me to learn to live with the fact that it happened, and figure out how to deal with the PTSD symptoms, the loss of friends, the loss of the sense of safety and the loss of youth, all of which happened incredibly brutally.
‘And I’ve been able to move on from this to working on preventing radicalisation and terrorism.
‘One of the cool things about my life now is that I get to travel around the world and meet amazing people who are doing great work, whether that is in schools to create better safeguarding for children or working in public policy.
‘So many people are dedicated to doing what they can within their corner to make the world safer and better for people, and that is the main thing that gives me hope.’
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