Norway buries first victims as police question gunman

Norway began burying Friday the 76 people killed in twin attacks exactly one week before, as police said psychiatrists would assess the mental health of perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik. Police said prosecutors had appointed two psychiatrists to determine if Behring Breivik, 32, is criminally responsible for the July 22 shooting spree at a youth camp and a car bomb blast in Oslo.
"The bullets hit our young, but they also struck an entire nation," Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said at a commemoration ceremony in the capital, calling the massacre "an attack on democracy." Flags flew at half-mast across the country of five million, including at the suspect's high-security prison, as formal grieving began for the victims. Norway's Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere attended the first funeral, of Bano Rashid, who was originally from Kurdistan, in the town of Nesodden, near the capital.
Rashid, a Labour Party youth activist among the 68 killed on the island of Utoeya as they attended a party summer camp, had written frequently about the evils of racism and discrimination. Her younger sister escaped the massacre on the island, and her mother told NTB: "The answer must not be hatred, but even more love."
Another shooting victim, 19-year-old Ismail Haji Ahmed, was being buried at Hamar, in Norway's south-west, TV2 reported. Behring Breivik was brought to police headquarters in an armoured car early Friday from Ila high security prison where he is being held in solitary confinement. The windows were covered to prevent photographers seeing inside.
He was questioned over statements he made during a first interrogation following his arrest on Utoeya. The far-right extremist admitted carrying out the attacks when questioned last Saturday, but stopped short of entering a guilty plea for actions that his lawyer said he deemed "cruel" but "necessary".
He had said in a 1,500-word tract published on the Internet before the attacks that he was trying to change the policies of western European governments who were encouraging Muslim immigration. On Monday a judge remanded him in custody for an initial period of eight weeks, but prosecutors have said it will take months to gather evidence and he will not be brought to trial until next year at the earliest.
In Oslo, Stoltenberg led a minute's silence before delivering a speech to hundreds of members of his governing Labour Party. "An attack against political engagement is an attack on our democracy." The crowd at the ceremony held aloft red roses, the Labour Party emblem, in a tribute to the victims.
"Today, it is exactly one week since Norway was struck by evil," the premier said. "Now, the time has come to commemmorate those who died." In "a massacre planned in minute detail and perpetrated in cold blood," the party's youth, including some of its brightest talents, were mown down "with their lives in front of them. Everything has been taken from them."
Stoltenberg also spoke for the seriously wounded in hospital, and those "who carry invisible scars, but who bleed and who are still bleeding." He said: "To our young socialists, I say this: you are not alone. Our movement is the shoulder on which you can cry, the backbone that will carry you forward and the hand you can hold."
The leader of the party's youth wing, Eskil Pedersen told the audience: "We will not remember our dead with grief, we will remember them with a smile." Pedersen, who was on the island at the time of the shootings, said: "We will forever be known as the July 22 generation."