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From Los Angeles Times

Toll rises to 87 in Norway after twin attacks

Officials say a gunman killed as many as 80 people at a youth camp near Oslo. Earlier, a blast in the capital killed seven people and damaged the prime minister's office. Suspicion falls on Islamic extremists or possibly neo-Nazi groups.

by Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times

July 22, 2011

Reporting from London

A horrific shooting rampage at a summer youth camp and a massive bomb in downtown Oslo stunned Norway, leaving at least 87 people dead in apparently related terrorist attacks in a nation long known as the home of the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the attacks, but speculation swirled around both Islamic militant groups and domestic right-wing extremists.

Al Qaeda previously has singled out Norway as an intended target, and a shadowy group affiliated with the terrorist network reportedly claimed responsibility, a statement that could not be verified.

A suspect was arrested in the shooting, and reports described him as a tall, fair-haired man who spoke fluent Norwegian. The justice minister identified him as a Norwegian citizen.

Friday's double attacks, which police said were linked, recalled the 2008 siege on multiple sites in Mumbai, India, that raised international fear of coordinated, sophisticated attacks on "soft" targets unprepared for a large-scale assault.

The rampage on Utoya, a small, heavily wooded island not far from Oslo, was a particularly harsh blow. A youth convention of the ruling Labor Party, the biggest political event of the summer, was underway there. Hundreds of young people, some of them teenagers, were in attendance.

Authorities said at least 80 people were killed by a gunman whom witnesses described as a man dressed in a police uniform.

The suspect, a 32-year-old Norwegian, was arrested on Utoya. Police later found undetonated explosives on the island.

The prime minister's office was heavily damaged by the bomb blast in Oslo, which killed seven people. Norwegian news reports said that Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg was working at another location and was unharmed. In a nationally televised address, he urged his compatriots not to be overcome by fear.

But the shock and scars from the violence will probably run deep in the normally placid, close-knit Scandinavian nation of about 5 million people. Authorities closed Norway's borders shortly after the attacks.

"Norway will stand together in a time of crisis," Stoltenberg said.

Addressing the attackers, he said: "You will not destroy our democracy and our ideals for a better world.... No one will bomb us into silence; no one will shoot us into silence."

At the White House, President Obama sent his condolences to the Norwegian capital and called for stronger global cooperation to combat terrorism.

"It's a reminder that the entire international community has a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring," said Obama, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. "We'll provide any support we can to them as they investigate these occurrences."

Mattias Carlsson, a Swedish journalist on Utoya, said he saw as many as 15 to 20 bodies on the shore and in the frigid waters around the island.

"Some have blood on their faces. There is clothing lying around at the shore, as if someone has tried to swim away," Carlsson said in a telephone interview. "There are four people and they are lying together as if they are hugging."

The shooting spree occurred not long after a bomb exploded in mid-afternoon in the center of Oslo. The location was near the prime minister's office and other government buildings, including the finance and oil ministries and the Supreme Court.

The blast, suspected to be a car bomb, was so powerful that it could be heard miles away, and blew out almost all the windows of an office tower. Seven people were killed and about 10 were injured, the justice minister, Knut Storberget, said.

Norwegian news reports said the man arrested on Utoya was also placed by witnesses at the scene of the bomb blast. There have been no reports so far of other plotters or attackers.

The SITE Intelligence Group, an independent organization that monitors Islamic extremist websites, said that a "prominent jihadist" named Abu Suleiman al Nasser claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement released on the Shumukh al Islam forum, which is linked to Al Qaeda.

Nasser linked the assault to Norway's deployment of troops in Afghanistan and to a bombing and suicide attack in central Stockholm in December in which only the bomber died.

The statement demanded that European countries withdraw their forces from Afghanistan and warned: "What you are seeing is merely the beginning, and what is coming is more."

A few years earlier, Muslims worldwide were enraged by a Norwegian newspaper's publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, that had originated in Denmark. In 2006, protesters, who found the depictions blasphemous, set fire to the Norwegian Embassy in Damascus, the Syrian capital.

But Norwegian authorities said they were not jumping to conclusions about who was responsible.

Until Friday, the country's official threat assessment was at the lowest possible level, and has been for years, except for a few months several years ago when it was raised to moderate, said Siv Alsen, a spokeswoman for Norway's intelligence agency, the Norwegian Police Security Service.

The threat was considered low despite the arrest almost exactly a year ago of three men suspected of being affiliated with Al Qaeda and plotting a terrorist attack. Two of the suspects were foreign-born legal residents of Norway, and the third was a foreign-born Norwegian citizen.

Last week, Mullah Krekar, an Iraqi-born cleric who lives in Norway, was charged with terrorism after allegedly threatening politicians with death if he is deported. Krekar is the founder of the militant Kurdish group Ansar al Islam.

And in 2003, an audio message from Ayman Zawahiri, who this year succeeded Osama bin Laden as leader of Al Qaeda, urged militants to attack the United States, Britain, Australia and Norway. Norwegians were puzzled by the inclusion of their country on the list; explanations centered on Norway's participation in the war in Afghanistan.

The country also faces a small but growing threat from neo-Nazi groups. There are indications that far-right extremists have established contact with organized criminal groups, which could give them easier access to weapons, the threat assessment said.

The bomb Friday left the streets of downtown Oslo carpeted with glass, documents, masonry and other debris. News agencies said the twisted, charred wreckage of a car could be seen close to the blast site.

"My first thought was that we were hit by lightning. So I ran onto the rooftop just to see if we had any damage," said Torbjorn Pedersen, a reporter at the newspaper Aftenposten. "But then I saw the smoke drifting from the [prime] minister's building."

The toll probably would have been far worse if not for the fact that many Norwegians are on their summer vacations and those still at work often leave early.

Not long after the blast, the shooting rampage began on Utoya. News reports said the gunman, wearing a police uniform, beckoned bystanders over to him, on the pretense that he wanted to speak to them about security measures in the wake of the bombing in Oslo. He then opened fire.

Emilie Bersaas, 19, told Sky News that she heard shooting, saw people running and screaming, then ran herself to a building to take cover. She and a friend piled clothes and a mattress onto a desk and hid under it.

"I felt kind of safe, but you never know," Bersaas said. "It's a lot of people on a small island. They're all shaken up right now."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-norway-bombing-20110723,0,5140691,print.story

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Norway survivors describe fleeing 'calm and controlled' gunman; death toll hits 91

Police begin searching two apartments owned by Anders Behring Breivik, 32, who is accused of setting off the Oslo bomb and shooting dozens at a youth camp. Survivors recall a gunman with both a handgun and machine gun who shot campers trying to flee.

by Edmund Sanders and Janet Stobart

Los Angeles Times

July 23, 2011

Norwegian police said Saturday that the death toll from Friday's attacks has risen to 91 and confirmed that they have arrested a suspect whom they described as a right-wing Christian fundamentalist.

In a news conference Saturday morning in Oslo, police confirmed that they had arrested Anders Behring Breivik, 32, on suspicion of orchestrating both the Oslo bombing and the youth-camp shooting rampage and had begun searching two apartments that he owns.

Breivik reportedly owns four properties including a farm on the outskirts of Oslo, allegedly to enable him to store legally a large amount of fertilizer.

Police would not comment on whether he acted alone but said no other arrests have been made. They said Breivik had no criminal record.

They would not speculate on his motives, but said, based own his own Twitter and Facebook accounts, he appeared to be a right-wing Christian fundamentalist.

Police say he was arrested by security forces at the Labor Party youth camp on the island of Utoya after the shootings. They said 84 people were killed on the island. At least seven were killed in the Oslo bombing.

Police Chief Oystein Maeland told reporters that they could not confirm the number of victims would stop at 91, adding that the attack had reached "catastrophic dimensions."

He said officers were still "looking in the water around the island for more victims."

Media reports say the gunman apparently used a handgun and a machine gun, and that police arrived at the island possibly 90 minutes after the shooting started. At midmorning Saturday, police were still searching the island for more bodies.

One wounded survivor, Adrian Pracon, described the gunman as "calm and controlled," shooting people who tried to escape the island by swimming to the mainland.

Pracon told BBC news that he saw two people approach the gunman, "and two seconds later they were both shot."

He said the gunman "looked like Nazi to me because of the hair ... and he was also very, very calm and controlled and sure about what he was doing."

Pracon described his attempt to escape. "We started running down to the water and people had already undressed and started swimming."

Pracon said he began swimming, but "after 150 meters ... I realized I wouldn't make it so I went back and saw him standing 10 meters from me shooting at the people who tried to swim over."

"He aimed the gun at me and I screamed at him 'No, please no.' I don't know if he listened to me."

Pracon said the gunman returned an hour later. "The shooting started and people were falling beside me, they were falling on top of me, falling injured into the water, so I just had to shield myself behind them and pray he wouldn't see me, and that's when he shot. I could feel his boots, I could feel the warmth of the barrel."

Others described being chased. "The man with the gun was running behind us, chasing us," said youth leader Lisa Marie Husby, who told BBC radio how she and 50 or 60 others ran to a cabin where she hid under a bed as the gunman shot through the door trying to get in.

When he went away, they heard more shooting: "I think I was under the bed for two to three hours, then we heard the helicopters and the police came."

Police said Breivik will face terrorism charges that carry a prison sentence of up to 21 years.

During a separate news conference, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said he had been personally involved in the Labor Party camp during his youth, and praised the fact that participants were able to exchange strong political views freely and without fear.

He called it a "childhood paradise" that "was turned into hell." He said he had been scheduled to visit the island today to address the youths.

Stoltenberg told reporters that some members of government had lost their lives in the bombing, but he could not confirm their identities. "We have a picture of the victims, but it is too early to say," he said.

He said Norwegians should not let the tragedy lead them to change their open society.

"It's this quality of life that has been abused and attacked. We must work hard to protect this so we don't lose that quality. This is what we have to resist."

He said the death toll was the highest in a single day in Norway since World War II.

Stoltenberg added that he will convene government ministers later today to discuss how to handle the crisis. Soldiers have been deployed throughout Oslo to assist police and protect government institutions.

He would not speculate on the suspect's motives, but said right-wing extremism has not been a serious issue before.

"Compared to other countries, I would not say that we have a big problem with right-wing extremism in Norway," he said. "But we have had some groups and we have followed them before."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fgw-norway-attacks-20110724,0,3095292,print.story

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From Google News

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Critics seek to stem deportations after U.S. boots thousands

WASHINGTON — Since the Bush administration rolled out a program in 2008 that shares fingerprints between local police and federal immigration agents, about 30,000 illegal immigrants convicted of serious crimes have been deported.

But even more immigrants — roughly 33,000 — have been thrown out of America without ever being convicted of non-immigration crimes.

Opponents of the program, Secure Communities, say it casts too wide a net and threatens community policing. The governors of Massachusetts, New York and Illinois have joined them in recent months.

While immigration officials defend Secure Communities and their plans to expand it to the entire country, they acknowledged the growing criticism again this week by giving a task force more time to look into the program.

For years now, illegal immigration has been a hot button issue. It's prompted new laws, tough enforcement, political action and localized violence. Some charge that illegal immigrants are stealing American jobs. Other see their labor as helping the nation keep its competitive edge at a low cost and filling jobs that many citizens refuse to do.

In June, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, John Morton, announced that the agency was creating an advisory committee to look into the program's practices relating to minor traffic offenses and report in 45 days, he said.

Immigrant rights groups remained skeptical, and on Wednesday more than 200 of them sent Morton a letter criticizing the committee's scope and composition.

"To adequately examine the program," they wrote, "the committee, at a minimum, must include affected community members who can speak to the impact of the program and be allowed to do significantly more than simply make recommendations about minor traffic offenses."

A spokeswoman for ICE, Nicole Navas, told McClatchy on Friday that the agency has given the task force more time to report its findings. The committee requested the additional time to solicit feedback from the public, law enforcement and other stakeholders, she wrote in an email.

The committee now will issue its final report in September, according to its chairman, Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum.

During the Obama administration — which deports more immigrants than any other in American history — and the Bush administration, Secure Communities has produced only a small portion of ICE's deportations.

The record numbers are concerning to Sarnata Reynolds, the policy director for refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA. Reynolds said most of the immigrants who were being deported were contributing members of society, and that many were doing jobs that employers couldn't find enough Americans to do.

"Crossing the border doesn't mean that you don't have human rights," Reynolds said. "It doesn't mean that you don't have civil rights."

Although Secure Communities is only one component of ICE's enforcement efforts, immigrant rights groups see it as particularly disruptive.

"I think it deservingly has gotten the most attention," said Melissa Keaney, a lawyer with the National Immigration Law Center, one of the groups that signed Wednesday's letter.

The program works by comparing the fingerprints taken in participating police stations against a nation database of immigration offenders. All the immigrants booked into the system have been arrested, but the matching process can take place before a decision is made about whether to charge them with crimes.

In April the Los Angeles Times published the story of an undocumented woman who, through Secure Communities, was turned over to immigration authorities after she called police to report domestic abuse. Police had booked her after seeing a red mark on the cheek of her alleged abuser, but she was never charged with a crime.

Stories such as that are making illegal immigrants less likely to cooperate with police, Reynolds said.

"The program has been touted as this unique and narrow tool that will target the worst of the worst," Reynolds said. "But instead, what it's done is sown incredible fear."

Secure Communities' effects on community policing have been discussed frequently by opponents to the program. Earlier this month, citing similar concerns, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino threatened in a letter to ICE director Morton to drop the program if it weren't improved.

As Wednesday's letter shows, many opponents think that ICE's task force stands little chance of significantly changing the program.

"I'm not optimistic," said Jacqueline Esposito, the director of immigration advocacy at the New York Immigration Coalition. "It's clear that (creating the task force) was a political move by ICE. It was not a genuine attempt at policy reform."

Navas, the ICE spokeswoman, disagreed, saying in her email that the committee shows the administration's "commitment to smart, effective immigration enforcement."

On the day last month that Morton announced the formation of the task force, he also issued a memorandum on "prosecutorial discretion," the power that ICE agents have to decide what action to take with suspected illegal immigrants. The memorandum asked agents to consider a list of factors, such as whether the person arrived as a child or served in the military, before deciding to pursue deportation.

Navas called last month's changes, including the creation of the task force, "key improvements" to Secure Communities. ICE plans to expand the program, which is now functioning in about the half the jurisdictions in the country, to every jurisdiction by 2013.

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/07/22/3788136/critics-seek-to-stem-deportations.html

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