“People were falling dead right in front of me,” Mr. Pracon said. “I ran through the campus to the tent area. I saw the gunman — two people started to talk to him and two seconds later they were both shot.”

He described the gunman as “sure, calm and controlled.”

“He screamed at us that we would all die,” Mr. Pracon said.

Terrified youths jumped into the water and “started to swim in a panic, and Utoya is far from the mainland,” said Bjorn Jarle Roberg-Larsen, a Labor Party member who spoke by phone with teenagers on the island, which has no bridge to the mainland. “Others are hiding. Those I spoke with don’t want to talk more. They’re scared to death.”

Many could not flee in time.

“He first shot people on the island,” a 15-year-old camper named Elise told The Associated Press. “Afterward he started shooting people in the water.”

Mr. Pracon said he also jumped into the water, but realized he could not reach the mainland and turned back.


“I saw him standing 10 meters from me, shooting at the people who were swimming,” he told the BBC. “He aimed his machine gun at me and I screamed at him, ‘No please no, don’t do it.’ I don’t know if he listened to me but he spared me.”

The suspect in the Norwegian attacks, Anders Behring Breivik, is shown in a photo from a Twitter account.

Deadly explosions shattered windows on Friday at the government headquarters in Oslo, which includes the prime minister’s office. A spokeswoman for Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said he was safe.
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A Twitter account apparently belonging to Mr. Breivik had one item, posted last Sunday: “One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.”

The New York Times


Mr. Pracon said he was huddled freezing in the cold rain with a number of other people, when the gunman returned later.

“The shooting started again and people were falling on top of me, on my legs and falling into the water,” he said, according to the BBC, “that’s when many people died. I just had to shield myself behind them, praying he wouldn’t see me.”

The gunman came so close that Mr. Pracon said he could feel the man’s breath and the warmth of the gun barrel, “But I didn’t move and that’s what saved my life,” he told the BBC.

Mr. Breivik was captured “by the emergency forces,” police officials said Saturday, but declined to provide further detail about the circumstances of his capture.

“As for right now, one man has been apprehended, and that’s all I can say,” Mr. Andresen said. The acting police chief, Sveinung Sponheim, said the suspect’s Internet postings “suggest that he has some political traits directed toward the right, and anti-Muslim views, but if that was a motivation for the actual act remains to be seen.”

He said the suspect had been seen in Oslo before the explosions. The police and other authorities declined to say what the suspect’s motivations might have been, but many speculated that the target was Mr. Stoltenberg’s liberal government.

The police said they also recovered explosives on the island.

Mr. Breivik had registered a farm-related business in Rena, in eastern Norway, which the authorities said allowed him to order a large quantity of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, an ingredient that can be used to make explosives.

Reuters quoted a spokeswoman from a farm supply chain as saying that the suspect had purchased six metric tons of fertilizer in May. “These are goods that were delivered on May 4,” Oddny Estenstad, a spokeswoman at agricultural supply chain Felleskjoepet Agri, told Reuters, without giving the exact type of fertilizer purchased.

Authorities were investigating whether the chemical may have been used to make the bombs.

A Facebook page matching his name and the photo given out by the police was set up just a few days ago. It listed his religion as Christian and his politics as conservative. It said he enjoys hunting, the video games World of Warcraft and Modern Warfare 2, and books including Machiavelli’s “The Prince” and George Orwell’s “1984.”

There was also a Twitter account apparently belonging to Mr. Breivik. It had one item, posted last Sunday: “One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.”

The attacks bewildered a nation better known for its active diplomacy and peacekeeping missions than as a target for extremists.

In Oslo, office workers and civil servants said that at least two blasts, which ripped through the cluster of modern office buildings around the central Einar Gerhardsen plaza, echoed across the city in quick succession around 3:20 p.m. local time. Giant clouds of light-colored smoke rose hundreds of feet as a fire burned in one of the damaged structures, a six-story office building that houses the oil ministry.

The force of the explosions blew out nearly every window in the 17-story office building across the street from the oil ministry, and the streets on each side were strewn with glass and debris. The police combed through the debris in search of clues.

Mr. Stoltenberg’s office is on the 16th floor in a towering rectangular block whose facade and lower floors were damaged. The justice ministry also has its offices in the building.

Norwegian authorities said they believed that a number of tourists were in the central district at the time of the explosion, and that the toll would surely have been higher if not for the fact that many Norwegians were on vacation and many more had left their offices early for the weekend.

“Luckily, it’s very empty,” said Stale Sandberg, who works in a government agency a few blocks down the street from the prime minister’s office.

After the explosions, the city filled with an unfamiliar sense of vulnerability. “We heard two loud bangs and then we saw this yellow smoke coming from the government buildings,” said Jeppe Bucher, 18, who works on a ferry boat less than a mile from the bomb site. “There was construction around there, so we thought it was a building being torn down.”

He added, “Of course I’m scared, because Norway is such a neutral country.”

For some Norwegians on Saturday, the scale of the attacks, and the fact that they appeared to have been carried out by one of their own, seemed particularly hard to grasp.

“It is difficult to think this is coming from inside our country, not outside,” said Thorbjorn Jagland, a Norwegian who is secretary general of the Council of Europe. “This is something surprising for all of us.”

“This is something that is not possible to understand at all,” he told BBC radio.