Tributes as first Norway victim is buried

Norway has honoured the memory of those killed in the nation’s worst peacetime massacre, as the prime minister callled on the nation to unite around its core values of democracy and peace.

An 18-year-old Muslim girl was the first victim to be laid to rest. Bano Rashid, a Kurdish immigrant from Iraq, was buried in a Muslim rite in Oslo after a church funeral service.

The service came as a person who was wounded in last week’s shooting rampage on Utoya island died, raising the death toll from the two attacks to 77.

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The man who has admitted carrying out the shootings that killed 69 and setting off a bomb in central Oslo that killed eight, Anders Behring Breivik, was taken from prison yesterday to be quizzed by police for a second time. Police lawyer Paal-Fredrik Hjort Kraby said the 32-year-old remained calm and co-operative during the session.

Investigators believe he acted alone, after years of meticulous planning, and have not found anything to support his claims he is part of an anti-Muslim militant network plotting coups d’etat across Europe.

In Britain, however, a former English Defence League activist has admitted his anti-Muslim blog entitled Richard The Lionhearted could have helped inform Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto in which he justifies the atrocities and is understood to refer to a “mentor”.

Paul Ray, 35, said: “I am being implicated as his (Breivik’s) mentor. I definitely could have been his inspiration. It looks like that. But what he did was pure evil. I could never use what he has done to further my own beliefs. What he has done does not equate to anything I am involved in.”

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Mr Ray’s comments came after Norway’s domestic intelligence chief said there was no evidence of links between Breivik, 32, and the English far right.

“Today it is one week since Norway was hit by evil,” Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said at yesterday’s memorial service at a community centre for Norway’s labour movement. The bullets were “aimed at the entire nation, Mr Stoltenberg said.

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