A Norwegian court has found that mass killer Anders Behring Breivik is sane and sentenced him to 21 years in jail.
Breivik admitted killing 77 people and wounding more than 240 others when he bombed central Oslo and then opened fire at an island youth camp last year.
He insisted he was sane and refused to plead guilty, seeking to justify his attacks by saying they were necessary to stop the “Islamisation” of Norway.
Prosecutors had called for him to be considered insane.
The five judges were unanimous in ruling that Breivik was sane.
He was convicted of terrorism and premeditated murder, and given the maximum sentence of 21 years’ imprisonment.
However, that can be prolonged at a later date if he is deemed to remain a danger to society.
Planned attack
Delivering the verdict, Judge Wenche Elisabeth Arntzen imposed a sentence of “preventive detention,” a special prison term for criminals considered dangerous to society.
She set the minimum length of imprisonment to 10 years.
Some of the survivors and relatives of his victims welcomed the verdict and the end of the trial.
“Now we won’t hear about him for quite a while. Now we can have peace and quiet,” Per Balch Soerensen, whose daughter was among those killed in the shooting massacre, told Denmark’s TV2.
“He doesn’t mean anything to me; he is just air.”
Court-appointed psychiatrists disagreed on Breivik’s sanity. A first team which examined him declared him to be a paranoid schizophrenic, but the second found he was sane.
Before the verdict, Breivik said psychiatric care would be “worse than death”.
He had said he would not appeal against a sanity verdict. The prosecution, which argued for insanity, could still appeal, says the BBC’s Lars Bevanger, at the court in Oslo.
Breivik will serve his sentence at Oslo’s high-security Ila Prison, where he has been held in isolation for most of the time since his arrest.
Initially he will be kept isolated from casual contact with other prisoners.
Breivik, 33, carried out the meticulously planned attack on 22 July 2011, wearing a fake police uniform, and methodically hunted down his victims.
He accused the governing Labour Party of promoting multiculturalism and endangering Norway’s identity.
Some victims at the Labour Party youth camp on Utoeya island were shot in the head at point-blank range.
Ahead of the verdict, security barriers were put up outside the district court in Oslo.
A glass partition separates Breivik from relatives of victims in a courtroom custom-built for the trial.
Remote-controlled cameras are filming the proceedings, sending the images to courtrooms around Norway where other relatives can watch the hearing live.
Breivik’s trial, which began in March and lasted for 10 weeks, heard graphic testimony from some of the survivors of his attacks.
Mohamad Hadi Hamed, 21, who is now in a wheelchair, told the court how his left arm and his left leg were amputated after he was shot by Breivik.
Another survivor, Einar Bardal, 17, described how he was trying to escape when he heard a loud bang, followed by a loud beeping noise in his head.
Experts in far-right ideology told the trial Breivik’s ideas should not be seen as the ramblings of a madman.
Breivik’s attacks ignited a debate about the nature of tolerance and democracy in Norway.
