Norway killer: 'Insane' diagnosis 'worse than death'
Published: APRIL 4, 2012 16:09
OSLO - A far-right militant who killed 77 people in Norway last year will use his trial to challenge a diagnosis that he is criminally insane, something that would be "worse than death," excerpts of a letter he wrote showed on Wednesday.
The trial of Anders Behring Breivik, who gunned down 69 at a Labour Party youth camp after detonating a car bomb in central Oslo that killed eight, starts in Oslo on April 16.
In November two court-appointed psychiatrists deemed the 33-year-old was psychotic and paranoid schizophrenic at the time of the attacks, which would normally mean he could not be sentenced to prison.
In a 38-page letter he wrote in jail, Breivik said, "I must admit this is the worst thing that could have happened to me as it is the ultimate humiliation," he wrote. "To send a political activist to a mental hospital is more sadistic and evil than to kill him! It is a fate worse than death."