Admitted terrorist has checkered past

The diplomat's son and former "hip-hopper" who has admitted the terrorist attacks in Norway claims to be part of a shadowy network of latter-day crusader knights set up in London in 2002 with cells across Europe.

In a 1,518-page manifesto posted online, Anders Behring Breivik says that the secret society is plotting the takeover of Western Europe by "indigenous Europeans." "A large successful attack every 5-12 years was optimal depending on available forces," he writes.

The man accused of one of the worst mass murders in history has a checkered past as a misfit who went from a graffiti tagger nicknamed Mord (Murder), whose best friend was a Pakistani immigrant, to a murderous antiIslamic extremist willing to blow up Oslo and kill youths at an island summer camp.

In his 90-minute rampage on Utoya island, he killed at least 86 people - almost one a minute.

Breivik attended a good college in Oslo, became a Freemason, and ran an ecommerce company with six employees, making a small fortune by the time he was 25.

His father, Jens, was a diplomat who served in the Norwegian Embassy in London and his mother, Wenche Behring, was a nurse. Both supported the Norwegian Labour Party, which Breivik attacked on Friday.

The Breiviks already had four other children from previous marriages, and divorced when their son was a year old.

Breivik appears angry about his absent father, ranting that multiculturalism had made European men feminine.

His father then married a fellow Norwegian diplomat in London and was reassigned to Paris. His mother married a Norwegian army major.

Breivik says he had not seen his father since he was 15, when the two fell out over his "graffiti phase."
He describes himself at the time as the most active graffiti "tagger" in Oslo and one of the most noted "hip-hoppers" on the west side of the city.

His best friend was a Pakistani immigrant, who loathed Norway. Although at first Breivik hung out with Pakistani gangs, he later claimed to have been beaten up by them eight times, once suffering a broken nose. At 16, he broke with his old friends and decided to concentrate on school.

Breivik's manifesto betrays extensive links to Britain. It is written in English under the anglicized name Andrew Berwick, and signed "London 2011," suggesting that he visited the capital this year.

The manifesto is entitled "2083 - A European Declaration of Independence," referring to the supposed year of the final coup against the "cultural Marxist/multiculturalist elites of Western Europe."
In it, he describes a mysterious English "mentor" he calls Richard, who wrote the founding document of their secret society, modelled on the Knights Templar military order that fought Muslims during the Crusades.

He says he was the youngest of five people at the founding meeting in 2002.