Breivik’s private emails published in new book in Norway

A new book out in Norway Monday publishes the private emails of Anders Behring Breivik, showing a killer fond of emoticons but devoid of emotion and illustrating his attention to detail in planning his attacks. The correspondence supports an Oslo court verdict last month that presumed Breivik sane when it found him guilty of the attacks, the book’s author Kjetil Stormark said. Stormark, a journalist who has already published a book on Breivik’s July 22, 2011 attacks that left 77 people dead and shook the Scandinavian nation, has gone through more than 7,000 emails from four accounts used by the 33-year-old right-wing extremist before the massacre. Most of the emails were business-like, with just a tiny handful sent to loved ones. The book, entitled “The Private Emails of a Mass Killer,” is based on correspondence obtained by hackers who accessed Breivik’s accounts after the attacks and then gave them to Stormark so he would give them to police, which he did before writing his book. The emails portray a cold, methodical and rather eloquent Breivik who shows little emotion, in line with the image he presented of himself during his 10-week trial that concluded in June. There are only a handful of messages sent to loved ones, mostly to his half-sister living in the United States. “Thanks very much for these great pictures, I’m going to show them to Mum!:D,” he writes to his “sis” in March 2010, after the birth of a baby. “I hope you’re feeling a bit better,” he wrote, signing off as “Annis” in what could be a phonetic transcription of how a young child would pronounce his first name. At the beginning of January 2011, he expressed his condolences to the buyer of one of his weapons after learning of a death in the family. “I hope that Christmas was OK for you and your family despite this,” he wrote.