He wanted to surprise the girls with a brand-new bathroom when they got back from Utøya. So on his return from Sweden, he went to the big store in Ski to buy a handle for the sliding door. That was where he was when he got the calls, first from Ali and then from Bano, about the bomb in Oslo.
Now he was on his way home with the shiny new handle.
The radio was on in the car.
They were talking about who could be behind the Oslo bomb when a text message came through to Mustafa’s phone:
Welove you more than anything in the world banoANDlara
theres a man with a gunHere will ring when we are safe
It was tricky typing on the boy’s phone; it did not have the same settings as hers. Lara had wondered whether to send the text, because she did not know where Bano was. She dared not tell her parents. So many shots, it never ended! And every single shot could be Bano. Lara and the four boys were still hiding in the bay beyond the little pumping station, where lots of the young people were now gathered.
Her father replied.
what’s happening?
A few minutes later, Lara texted again.
Somebody shooting don’t know where Bano is
Then her father wrote:
Can you ring me?
There was no answer. He sent another message.
I know it not true, you are not Bano or Lara
A new message from the same unknown number lit up his screen.
We love you so much. But somethings happened
It was 17.47.
At the same time, the joint operational centre in Oslo sent out a message to all units.
‘01 with important message to all. In connection with both the explosion in the government quarter and the shooting on Utøya in Nordre Buskerud it has been observed that the suspect is wearing a police or security guard uniform – out.’
When the message went out over the radio, more than two hours had passed since Andreas Olsen, the guards in the government quarter and other eyewitnesses had first reported that the man was in uniform.
Five minutes later, at 17.52, the local patrol from Nordre Buskerud police station reached the MS Thorbjørn jetty. On the way there, the officers in the car had been informed by their chief of operations: ‘Helicopter on its way, possibly also Delta.’ They were told to exercise caution, and to wait for the police boat.
When they got out of the car they could hear the shots. They were being fired in a steady stream, controlled and distinct, from two different weapons, never simultaneous or from more than one place on the island at the same time. From this they deduced that it was a lone perpetrator.
The two policemen were standing on the jetty observing, as they had been ordered to do. Observe, and wait for the police boat. They were heavily armed. And they stood waiting, while the shots rang out on the other side of the strait.
Official police instructions are that when the situation is defined as ‘shooting in progress’, officers are obliged to make a direct intervention. No such actions were undertaken.
Utøya was six hundred metres away.
On a sunny day, there would have been lots of boats in the fjord. Today, it was empty. The boats lay moored close by. The local patrol made no attempt to fetch one to approach Utøya. They did nothing but listen to the shots.
Since there was a clear line of sight over to the island, the patrol was worried about being shot at. The officers took refuge behind a container on the jetty. Three minutes after arrival, at 17.55, the patrol reported that the rendezvous point would have to be moved up to the road. Eventually one of them went up to the road to direct the traffic and clear the way for the emergency response unit. The two officers lost connection.
Nordre Buskerud police district had a boat of its own, a red rubber dinghy, which was kept in a trailer outside the police station. But it was not kept in a state of readiness. The incident commander had to inflate the boat and put petrol in the engine. The Hønefoss fire service, on the other hand, had a large and steady boat ready and waiting at the quay by the fire station. They rang at an early stage and offered assistance, but their offer was turned down because the local police had their own boat. When the police station later rang back to ask to use the fire boat after all, they could not get through. The chief of operations rang the fire station again and again, but she was dialling the wrong number.
Neither the emergency response unit coming from Oslo nor Håvard Gåsbakk on his way from Hønefoss had been given any definite information about where to rendezvous. Gåsbakk, however, took it for granted that it would be at the MS Thorbjørn jetty, straight across from the island.
The Delta emergency response unit did not know where Utøya was. The first patrol had GPS in its vehicle, but the small islands in the Tyrifjord were not named on the system. The Delta troops in the black cars tried to make contact with Nordre Buskerud police to get definite instructions about where to meet and to alert them to the fact that extra boats would be needed for their personnel. But the emergency network did not yet extend as far as Nordre Buskerud and analogue police radio coverage only worked until Sollihøgda, which was halfway there. Consequently, the telephone was the only form of communication open to them, but the switchboard of the local operations centre was jammed with incoming calls and did not answer the emergency response unit’s call.
The lack of communication made it impossible to use the journey time to plan or coordinate the operation. When the Nordre Buskerud operations centre was finally informed that Delta was on its way, it was given no indication of how large a force it would be, or that it was coming by road. Right up until 18.00, the local chief of operations assumed the response unit was arriving by helicopter and would fly directly to Utøya.
When this was finally clarified, a fatal misunderstanding ensued. When Nordre Buskerud informed the response unit where to rendezvous, it said ‘meet on the jetty’.
‘Which jetty?’ asked the Delta man. ‘Do you mean the jetty at the golf course?’ It was the only place he knew by the Tyrifjord.
The chief of operations at Hønefoss held the line while she turned to the chief of staff, who had just come into the station, and said, ‘Delta says the rendezvous point is at the golf course.’
The chief of staff, on the phone to someone ringing from Utøya, merely nodded and the chief of operations said to Delta:
‘Okay, let’s say the golf course.’
The meeting point was thus moved to a location 3.6 kilometres from the island. The original spot where the patrol from Nordre Buskerud was observing, and where Håvard Gåsbakk was headed, was only six hundred metres from Utøya.
The occupants of the first vehicle in the response unit convoy had not been told that the meeting point had changed. At 18.01 they turned off the main road and followed the track down to Utvika Camping, next to MS Torbjørn’s jetty. The car drove down to the water, where there were several boats. If they had taken one of the boats moored there, they could have been over on the island within minutes. But here the driver received a radio message instructing him to turn round and go back up the track again. The cars behind did the same manoeuvre, leaving the jetty. Then they were up on the main road again, heading away from the island.
Gåsbakk had almost reached the Thorbjørn’s landing stage when he was instructed to turn round and drive to the golf course.