Oslo - The father of two teenagers on Utoeya who tried to alert police to the shooting on the island was told to “Get your children to call us themselves,” a Norwegian paper reported on Wednesday.
After receiving an alarming call from his daughter, Geir Johnsen rang police but said he was met with a wall of incredulity.
“What happened is that I was absolutely not believed when I explained what my daughter on Utoeya had told me. I was told if that was the case, the children had only to call the police themselves. Even when I begged them to take me seriously,” he told the local newspaper Fremover.
After two or three minutes of “frustrating” conversation, “I think I said something like, 'you really aren't being much help, you old bitch' and she told me not to call her a bitch,” Johnsen said.
After the explosion of the powerful car bomb in central Oslo, an hour and a half before the shooting began on Utoeya, police were focussing all their attention on the capital, leaving the field clear for gunman Anders Behring Breivik who drove to the island before opening fire on youths attending a summer camp there.
Police have acknowledged that they did not arrive on the island until an hour after being told about the shooting, notably because there was no helicopter available.
Freddy Lie, another father who had one daughter killed and another injured on Utoeya, told AFP that police insisted to him “It's in Oslo that it's all going on” when he reported the shooting after one of his daughters raised the alarm. - Sapa-AFP