Anders Behring ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to execute more people’

 DEFIANT mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik said he regretted not executing more people during his rampage as he rejected a chance to appeal his 21-year sentence.Breivik's gruesome statement yesterday marked the end of a legal process into the massacre that left 77 people dead, which has haunted Norway for 13 months.

Prosecutors said they, too, would not appeal the ruling by Oslo's district court, which declared the right-wing extremist sane enough to be held criminally responsible for attacks "unparalleled in Norwegian history".

"Since I don't recognise the authority of the court I cannot legitimise the Oslo district court by accepting the verdict," Breivik said. "At the same time, I cannot appeal the verdict, because by appealing it I would legitimise the court."

Then, Breivik said he wanted to issue an apology, but it wasn't for the victims, most of them teenagers gunned down in one of the worst peacetime shooting massacres in modern history.

"I wish to apologise to all militant nationalists that I wasn't able to execute more," he said.

Earlier, Breivik smiled with apparent satisfaction when Judge Wenche Elisabeth Arntzen read the ruling, declaring him sane enough to be held criminally responsible and sentencing him to "preventive detention", which means it is unlikely he will ever be released.

The sentence brings a form of closure to Norway, which was shaken to its core by the attacks on July 22, 2011, because Breivik's lawyers said before the verdict that he would not appeal any ruling that did not declare him insane.The five-judge panel in the Oslo district court unanimously convicted Breivik (33) of terrorism and premeditated murder and ordered him imprisoned for a period between 10 and 21 years.

Such sentences can be extended as long as an inmate is considered too dangerous to be released.

Legal experts say Breivik will almost certainly spend the rest of his life in prison."He has killed 77 people, most of them youths who were shot without mercy, face to face. The cruelty is unparalleled in Norwegian history," Judge Arne Lyng said. "This means that the defendant even after serving 21 years in prison would be a very dangerous man."

Some far-right leaders argued that the verdict played into their core beliefs, though they have spoken out against his violent rampage."It was obviously wrong what he did, but there was logic to all of it," said Stephen Lennon, the 29-year-old leader of the English Defence League.

"By saying that he was sane, it gives a certain credibility to what he had been saying. And that is, that Islam is a threat to Europe and to the world."Survivors of the attacks and relatives of victims welcomed the ruling.

Norwegian police and government ministers have faced severe criticism for their actions before and during the attacks. It took police more than an hour to reach Utoya, as a boat carrying the SWAT team was overloaded and stalled in the middle of the lake. Norway's only police helicopter wasn't used because its crew was on vacation.Norway's justice minister and police chief both resigned in the aftermath.

The judges took turns reading sections of the 90-page ruling, starting with the verdict and sentence, and then going over a chronology of the rampage, victim by victim, and describing their injuries.

Judge Lyng noted that the fertiliser bomb that Breivik set off outside the government headquarters could have been even more devastating."It was pure luck that not many more were killed," Judge Lyng said.

Since his guilt was not in question, Breivik's sanity was the key issue to be decided by the trial, with two psychiatric teams reaching opposite conclusions.One gave Breivik a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, a severe mental illness that would preclude imprisonment; while the other found him narcissistic and dissocial -- having a complete disregard for others -- but criminally sane.

The court criticised the psychiatric assessment that found Breivik insane, saying his perception of being a commander in a civil war can be explained in the context of a "fanatic and right-wing extremist view of the world" rather than as delusions of a sick mind.It also found his controlled behaviour while planning and carrying out his complex plot "difficult to reconcile with an untreated form of paranoid schizophrenia".