A 38-year-old Dane pleaded guilty Wednesday (May 18) in Norway to stabbing five people to death and trying to kill 11 others with a bow and arrow last year in the southeast of the Scandinavian country. .
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On October 13, Espen Andersen Bråthen terrorized Kongsberg, a sleepy town in southeastern Norway, by shooting arrows at people inside and outside a supermarket, then stabbing five others to death. residents at home or on the street.
Judged from Wednesday in Hokksund, Bråthen admitted the facts.
“
Everything, I recognize everything
,” he said.
If the police had initially leaned towards the trail of an attack, everything today seems to indicate that it was the gesture of an unbalanced person.
Paranoid schizophrenia
Arrested 35 minutes after the first reports, Bråthen was quickly placed in a medical institution.
Three experts who observed him concluded that there was an abolition of discernment, the suspect suffering from paranoid schizophrenia since 2007. Both the prosecution and the defense considered that he could not be held criminally responsible and advocated psychiatric internment rather than a prison sentence.
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According to the prosecution, Bråthen had armed himself with a bow, 60 arrows and four knives on the day of the attacks.
His five victims are four women and a man aged 52 to 78.
The trial is scheduled to last until June 17, with a verdict expected in the following weeks.
