[PHOTOS] Three rooms, three parakeets, an Xbox: how Anders Behring Breivik, who says he is “treated like an animal”, is serving his sentence

Three private rooms, as many parakeets, an Xbox: the lawsuit brought against the Norwegian state by the murderer Anders Behring Breivik who complains of being “treated like an animal” highlights conditions of detention that would make one green with envy many prisoners in the world.

• Read also: Norway: twelve years after Utoya, Breivik remains an extreme danger, according to the State

• Read also: Norway: a “suicidal” Breivik takes the state to court to protest against his isolation

Since March 2022, Breivik has been serving his sentence in the very high security section of Ringerike prison, on the edge of the lake which bathes the island of Utøya where he shot dead 69 people, most of them teenagers, on July 22, 2011 Earlier, he detonated a bomb in Oslo, killing eight others.

The 44-year-old right-wing extremist has three individual rooms – a living room, a study and a gym – on the upper floor and on the lower floor which he shares (never at the same time). with another inmate, a kitchen, a TV lounge with game console, a dining room and a room for visits.

“Breivik is particularly well treated” within the framework permitted by security considerations, underlined Wednesday the director of the prison, Eirik Bergstedt.

If the decor is simple, the rooms are well equipped with several weight machines in the gym cell as well as a large flat screen, several armchairs for playing Xbox with guards and posters of the Eiffel Tower in the TV room .

Despite this profligacy of means, Breivik, sentenced in 2012 to a 21-year prison sentence extendable indefinitely, is taking the Norwegian state to court again this week to protest against its prison regime.

The authorities are trying to “push me to suicide,” he said, in tears, on Tuesday.

Although the extremist is accustomed to pranks – in a letter to the AFP in 2014, he threatened to start a hunger strike in prison if he did not obtain, among other things, a Playstation 3 rather than a PS2-, it is not the material conditions of his detention that he criticizes.

Kept for around 12 years apart from other prisoners, he accuses the State of violating two articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, one which prohibits “inhuman” or “degrading” punishments, other which guarantees a right to correspondence.

Dungeon”…

“They built a dungeon around me” to “wall me in,” Breivik complained Tuesday.

“I’m not a hamster, I need real human relationships,” he said.

His isolation is only relative: in addition to his contacts with the guards with whom he can play cards, cook or have lunch, Breivik is authorized to regularly see a pastor, a physiotherapist, a psychiatrist or even a visitor from the Red Cross with a dog he can pet.

He himself has ended his contacts with a visitor designated by the authorities, but can, for one hour a week, meet another inmate, also hand-picked – but candidates are rare, according to the prison authorities -, with whom he can make waffles, for example.

But no one, according to him, with whom he could develop a truly personal relationship.

Generally, these meetings take place around a table, which he calls “Putin’s table”, with several guards sitting between the two prisoners for security reasons.

…or a “palace”?

In addition to various activities (basketball, walks, library, etc.), the authorities gave him three parakeets to fulfill his wish to have a pet.

“I asked for a dog, a goat or a dwarf pig with whom we can establish empathetic contact, which can be a good alternative solution for people in isolation,” commented Breivik.

“But parakeets are better than nothing.”

Large mammals, “it’s not very practical in a high security neighborhood,” replied a lawyer for the state, Kristoffer Nerland. “And then, the veterinary authorities would perhaps find fault with it.”

On the web, Internet users joke about these conditions of detention compared to “a hotel” or “a palace”. “Others take prison guards hostage so they can have a pizza,” reacted a Swede on X (ex-Twitter).

“The Norwegian system is as it is, but as a mother whose daughter he killed, it’s hard to see him complaining about his beautiful apartment,” Lisbeth Kristine Røyneland, Synne’s mother, commented to AFP. , broke at 18 on Utøya.

“But at least he’s behind bars and he’ll never come out.”