Dear God. This was a slaughter.
Crazed gunman Anders Behring Breivik slaughtered 80 youths on Utoya Island on Friday.
Dressed as a policeman, he lured the children over, loaded his gun and shot them dead. He shot at the children while they were trying to swim away to safety. There were 500 children on the island attending camp.
The children were attending camp.
The AP reported:
A Norwegian who dressed as a police officer to gun down summer campers killed at least 80 people at an island retreat, horrified police said early Saturday. It took investigators several hours to begin the realize the full scope of Friday’s massacre, which followed an explosion in nearby Oslo that killed seven and that police say was set off by the same suspect.
The mass shootings are among the worst in history. With the blast outside the prime minister’s office, they formed the deadliest day of terror in Western Europe since the 2004 Madrid train bombings killed 191.
Police initially said about 10 were killed at the forested camp on the island of Utoya, but some survivors said they thought the toll was much higher. Police director Oystein Maeland told reporters early Saturday they had discovered many more victims.
“It’s taken time to search the area. What we know now is that we can say that there are at least 80 killed at Utoya,” Maeland said. “It goes without saying that this gives dimensions to this incident that are exceptional.”
It was a slaughter.
Please keep these people in your thoughts and prayers.