Survivors: 'We were sitting ducks'

When the blond man in the police uniform started firing his assault rifle, many of the youths couldn't believe it was real.

It had to be a sick prank. Something this crazy could never happen in quiet, sensible Norway.

Then terror flared in the eyes of friends with a better view: of teens and young adults crumpling to the ground, blood streaming from point-blank bullet wounds.

Hundreds turned and ran to every corner of Utoya Island.

They opted to cower silently or swim for their lives.

One day after a gunman posing as their protector killed at least 85 campers at a youth retreat for Norway's ruling Labor Party, survivors and the local boatmen who helped save them recounted their two hours of horror, confusion and fear.

Adrian Pracon described coming face-to-face with Anders Behring Breivik, 32, as he went on a shooting spree on the island of Utoya in an interview with the Herald on Sunday from his hospital bed.

He described hiding amongst the dead bodies of his friends after being shot by a crazed gunman at point-blank range.

Breivik has been named as being solely responsible for killing at least 84 people on the island, and another seven in an earlier bomb blast.

His lawyer today confirmed to Norwegian media his client had accepted responsibility for the bomb and shooting attack which has killed at least 90 people.

Pracon, 21, said Breivik flashed his police badge before he mercilessly shot and killed 20 people around him as they begged for their lives.

"He told them: 'You are all going to die, this is your day to
die'."

Speaking to the Herald on Sunday from a hospital close to Utoya island, where around 45 of the injured had been taken, Pracon said he first saw the gunman while trying to swim off the island to safety in freezing conditions.

"I tried to swim away. He pointed the barrel at me, I said 'no don't do it'. We were sitting ducks."

After coming ashore, Pracon lay among the corpses that were strewn around the bank as the gunman came back again.

"He saw I was there lying face down. He shot me in the back but I didn't move an inch.

"I could feel his breathing, I could hear the sound of his shoes, I could feel the warmth of his barrel. He shot me from close range, but I didn't move an inch.

"It was the worst horror movie, terrible, that you have ever seen.

"He likes to see people run, he likes to see people suffer and pray for their lives. They were shouting, they were begging don't kill me, and
then he shot them.

"I didn't care for myself at that point, I was sure I was going to die."

Pracon kept pressure on the bullet wound to his shoulder and helped another woman who had been shot in the legs for around an hour until help arrived.

"It was hard to help someone with one hand."

Before the shooting began, Pracon said the 600 mainly teenagers on Otoya Island for a youth camp had been deeply upset by the bomb blast which hit the Parliament buildings in central Oslo.

"We started to assemble and figure out what had happened in Oslo. We were told a police man was coming over to give us information.

"We really needed a police officer right then. He was dressed as a police officer, he had a police badge. And then he started shooting.

"People all around me were falling. He shot some of them five times."

Pracon said he had seen images on television broadcasts of himself wearing a grey t-shirt and dark coloured pants, lying among bodies piled up on the edge of the island as Breivik walked casually past.

He said everyone at the hospital was supporting each other.

"I really cared for some of the people left behind. But in this country we stick together no matter what, and we will get through this."

Another Oslo Labor activist, Prableen Kaur, wrote on her blog the next day those gathered had been worried after they'd heard about the bombing in central Oslo.

"We consoled ourselves that we were safe on an island. No one knew that hell would break out with us too," she said.

At the camp's food hall, Jorgen Benone said he was talking with friends about the Oslo attack as they "hear panic down by the water."

"We were wondering: What's happening? Is it some balloons exploding or is somebody kidding?" he says. "Then we started to understand that people actually had been shot. Chaos broke out everywhere, and everyone started to run."

People at the camp report trying to call Norway's emergency services but are told to keep off the line unless they're calling about the Oslo bomb.

Witnesses say the gunman enters a village of tents, the residential heart of the weeklong retreat, and spots desperate individuals hoping he'll spare them if they run back inside their homes.

But the killer is seen working his way tent by tent, shooting many point-blank, one by one.

Prableen Kaur joins a group of panicked, confused campers.

They are running from the approaching gunman, his 'POLICE' moniker crystal-clear to see from even middle distance.

"My first thought was: Why are the police shooting at us? What the hell?" she wrote on her blog.

More than a dozen crowd into a dark corner of a camp building, and all lie down on the floor. She cries quietly -- then sees her best friend from camp, a boy, through a window.

"I wondered if I should go out and bring him to me. I did not. I saw fear in his eyes," she wrote.

Kaur says a burst of gunfire extremely close to the building triggers panic and the entire group leaps out of a far window.

Several suffer injuries, including a girl with a broken ankle, but the shooter doesn't immediately pursue them. She takes new cover behind a low brick wall, telephones her mother on her cell phone, and sends a text to her father.

"Many were there," she writes. "I prayed, prayed, prayed. I hope that God saw me."

As the gunman picks off lone campers who run from their hiding spots as he draws near, many find themselves at the shoreline with only one apparent escape route - the water.

Kaur says the gunman tries to draw out the hiders near the brick wall, shouting, "I'm from the police!" Campers shout back, "Prove it!"

He shoots at those who move. She lies still, on top of the legs of a teenage girl covered in blood.

At another camp site on the mainland shore near Utoya Island, camp owner Brede Johbraaten had been listening to the sound of gunfire - sometimes lone pops, other times staccato bursts - waft across the humid evening air for more than half an hour.

But it's only then that he discovered the horror unfolding some 800 meters of frigid water away.

The first survivors, among the strongest and luckiest, swam the full distance.

They weren't wounded but said many of their campmates were dying in the water behind, some bleeding to death from bullet wounds, others cramping up and drowning.

Johbraaten, 59, and other campers rallied several small craft to join a local flotilla converging on the island from several points, including another island to the north.

They plucked both flailing swimmers and lifeless bodies from the surface.

"It was hard for some of these youngsters to swim a distance of 800 meters under these conditions," Johbraaten said.

Amid the chaos, the arriving police SWAT team complained that no boats have remained on shore as they'd expected, compounding the delay.

Witnesses lying low behind rocks, aware that the "policeman" is really the threat, watch helplessly as four campers run to the officer for help - and are each killed with shots to the head.


- with AFP