Railway officials said parts of the station were evacuated Wednesday after the abandoned bag was discovered in an area where buses depart for the airport.
Norway is on high alert after a bombing and massacre last week that killed 76 people.
Police on Tuesday began releasing some of the names of those killed — three who were killed in the bomb blast in Oslo and one in the shooting rampage at an island youth camp.
The defense lawyer for the Norwegian man who confessed to the attacks, Anders Behring Breivik, says the case suggests his client is insane.
At a news conference in Oslo Tuesday, defense attorney Geir Lippestad told reporters it was too early to say if Breivik would plead insanity. He said Breivik is not aware of the death toll nor of the public response to the massacre.
While Breivik has admitted responsibility for the attacks, he has pleaded not guilty to the terrorism charges, claiming he acted to save Europe from what he says is Muslim colonization.
Police Tuesday detonated a cache of explosives found at a farm Breivik rented about 160 kilometers north of Oslo. Breivik reportedly used the farm as a cover for ordering the six tons of fertilizer he used to make his bomb.
A country of less than 5 million people, Norway has seen its once homogeneous population change in recent years with new arrivals from Africa and the Middle East. This transformation, in part, drove Anders Behring Breivik, charged with Friday's car bombing and shooting spree that killed at least 76 people in the span of a few hours.
Now, even as this country still grieves for its victims, many say how Norway responds to the attacks could define immigration policy in the future.
Some of his ideas are more commonplace than we’d like them to be,” says Rune Berglund Steen, communication manager for the Norwegian Center Against Racism. "This skepticism of Muslims has become a fairly central topic in Norwegian politics.”
Norway’s second-largest political party in parliament, the Progress Party, has been accused of backing xenophobic positions and Breivik was on the party’s member registry until 2006. The party quickly denounced the attacks and Breivik’s beliefs.
Mr. Steen says most Norwegians have a positive view toward immigrants. For example, he said a recent poll found that about 8 out of 10 Norwegians found it favorable if a child attends a school with mixed ethnicities.
But for Breivik and his ilk, Muslim newcomers here represent a "takeover."
“The problem can only be solved if we completely remove those who follow Islam. In order to do this all Muslims must ‘submit’ and convert to Christianity,” he wrote in his manifesto. “If they refuse to do this voluntarily prior to Jan. 1, 2020, they will be removed from European soil and deported back to the Islamic world.”
Most Norwegians, however, reject Breivik’s anti-Islamic views, preferring to see themselves as a tolerant, peaceful people and Breivik as a backwards extremist.
“It’s the fact that he attacked our multiculturalism,” says Alexander Roine, waiting outside the courthouse where Breivik appeared Monday.
Mr. Roine, an Oslo native whose father came from Tunisia, says Norway is rightly famous for its peaceful, tolerant attitude but conceded older generations are still adjusting to the country’s brisk demographic shift.
“We would think a guy with these views would be like 50 or 60 years old,” he says of Breivik. “This guy was born in a Norway that was already multicultural. He attacked everything this country stands for to the last detail.”
Norway has experienced a steady rise in immigration, like many European countries, with the number of its immigrants doubling since 1995.
Most came for the robust economy, political stability and generous welfare state, settling in dense pockets in Norway’s largest cities. It’s estimated that 11 percent of Norwegians are immigrants or the children of immigrants and about 2 percent of the population practices Islam.
No comments:
Post a Comment