LONDON — A new psychiatric evaluation of confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik has concluded that he is sane, contradicting a previous assessment of him as psychotic, court officials in Oslo announced Tuesday.
The finding comes a few days before Breivik's trial is scheduled to begin, and throws into question what kind of sentence the 33-year-old could receive, whether imprisonment or psychiatric treatment.
Breivik has confessed to carrying out the twin attacks in Norway last July that claimed the lives of 77 people. A car bombing in the center of Oslo, the Norwegian capital, was followed by a massacre on the island of Utoya, where the heavily armed Breivik calmly hunted down and picked off young people gathered at a politically-themed summer camp.
Breivik says he intended for the attacks to ignite a revolution to reclaim Europe from Muslim immigrants.
In a lengthy, rambling manifesto posted on the Internet, he called himself a "knight" on a crusade to prevent "cultural suicide" by "indigenous Europeans" too misguided to stand up for their own Christian heritage.
The massacre was Norway's worst-ever peacetime atrocity, and raised alarm throughout Europe over the rise of right-wing extremism.
Last November, a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation judged Breivik to be criminally insane, a controversial finding that would most likely result in his transfer from prison to a mental hospital for long-term treatment. But Breivik himself rejected the conclusion, saying he not only knew what he was doing but that it was the right thing.
The new report says that he was not psychotic either at the time of the attacks or presently. The evaluators also concluded that there was a high risk of another violent outburst.
His trial is expected to start next Monday and last through June.
