Police said they did not know the motive or whether the attacks were the work of one person or a terrorist group, but Justice Minister Knut Storberget said the man who opened fire at the youth camp is Norwegian. In Oslo, the capital and the city where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded, the bombing left a square covered in twisted metal, shattered glass, documents expelled from surrounding buildings and a dust-fogged scene that reminded one visitor from New York of Sept. 11. Ian Dutton, who was in a nearby hotel, people "just covered in rubble" were walking through "a fog of debris."
"It wasn't any sort of a panic," he said, "It was really just people in disbelief and shock." Later at Utoya island, some 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest, hundreds of youths at a camp where the prime minister had been scheduled to speak Saturday ran in terror and even tried swimming to safety as the gunman fired. Emilie Bersaas, identified by Sky News television as one of the youths on the island, said she ran inside a school building and hid under a bed. "At one point the shooting was very, very close (to) the building, I think actually it actually hit the building one time, and the people in the next room screamed very loud," she said.
"I laid under the bed for two hours and then the police smashed a window and came in," Bersaas said. "It seems kind of unreal, especially in Norway. This is not something that could happen here." Police said seven people died in the Oslo blast, and another 9 or 10 people were killed at the camp, which was organized by the youth wing of the ruling Labor Party. Acting national Police Chief Sveinung Sponheim said a man was arrested in the shooting, and the suspect had been observed in Oslo before the explosion there. Police did not immediately say how much time elapsed between the bombing and the camp attack. Sponheim said the camp shooter "wore a sweater with a police sign on it. I can confirm that he wasn't a police employee and never has been."
Aerial images broadcast by Norway's TV2 showed members of a SWAT team dressed in black arriving at the island in boats and running up the dock. Behind them, people stripped down to their underwear swam away from the island toward shore, some using flotation devices. Sponheim said police were still trying to get an overview of the camp shooting and could not say whether there was more than one shooter. He said several people were injured but he could not comment on their conditions. In Oslo, most of the windows in the 20-floor high-rise where Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and his administration work were shattered. Other buildings damaged house government offices and the headquarters of some of Norway's leading newspapers. and that rescuers were to search damaged buildings through the night for more victims.
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