Norwegian Police Stops Utøya Boat Sale - The Nordic Reporter

Police in Norway’s Nordre Buskerud stopped the sales of the red ‘Utøya boat’ on Thursday, after a storm of criticism.

A month after the massacre on Utøya, the corps wanted to get rid of its ‘black sheep’: the rubber boat with which a SWAT team tried unsuccessfully to reach the island on 22 July 2011. A lawyer for one of the Utøya survivors, among others, did not think that was a good idea.

“The boat is a piece of evidence. The sale is part of a long, incomprehensible series of actions by the police during and after the events of 22 July,” lawyer Arne Seland told Norwegian national broadcaster NRK.

The Zodiac II 550 from 1998 became world news partly thanks to amateur images. It showed the clearly overloaded boat. The 75-horsepower engine gave out. Private boats came to the rescue and brought the officers to the island, where they detained gunman Anders Behring Breivik.

According to the French manufacturer, the dinghy can handle a maximum of ten adults, not counting extra kilos of bulletproof protection and weapons of an arrest team. According to a spokesperson, the old boat is ideal for recreational divers and had to yield at least 550 euros. More than 2500 euros had already been offered.

The Nordre Buskerud corps hoped the sale could cover part of the costs of two better boats purchased at the end of July. | © 2011 Marcel Burger for ANP News Agency (original published in Dutch on 25 August 2011)

GREENLAND, 12 SEP 2023: Cruise ship Ocean Explorer with 206 people on board has gone aground in the Alpefjord of Greenland, where the Nordøstgrønland National Park is situated, on Tuesday. The Danish military - Greenland is a semi-autonomous country, under Danish rule - has sent patrol vessel P570 Knud Rasmussen to the area. But it will take days for it to sail the more than 1,200 kilometres (about 650 nautical miles) to the Ocean Explorer. The Danish Arctic Command hopes the vessel is able to get itself free with high tide.

FINLAND, 11 SEP 2023: Three neo-nazis stand accused in Finland for preparing a terror attack, that included shooting the then Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin. The trial against the three men, of which the main suspect was a candidate for the so-called True Finns political party, started in the court of Päijänne-Tavastland. All suspects are Finnish and key-evidence is there own statements, intercepted Telegram communications between the suspects and 3D printed guns. The men are 21, 26, 28 years old. A 66-year-old man is suspected of aiding, but does not stand trial in this case.

SWEDEN, 11 SEP 2023: Ten people are accused of killing a 15-yr-old boy in a sushi restaurant in Skogås, as Stockholm suburb, in January. The ten are between 16 and 27 years old, and include the 16-yr-old guy that pulled the trigger and killed the then equally old boy, investigators say. The police beliefs the hit was ordered and can be connected to the so-called "Kurdish fox" (kurdiska räven), which has been identified by Swedish police as a major crime boss. Of the ten suspects of this killing, only one remains at large. #shootingssweden

NOTE, 1 SEPTEMBER 2023:
Twitter ends. Over the past 13 years I used Twitter to bring you daily news, quickly and short, in addition to my web channel. First from Scandinavia, with Poland and the Baltic states added a few years ago. I have decided to leave Twitter/X. Once, it was a great, free and simple channel, easy to include in my website and accessible to all - even for those without a Twitter account. That were precisely the reasons why I used Twitter, during most of my 15 years as a correspondent/reporter based in Sweden, and even after I moved to Poland more than 2 years ago.
Recent changes dictated by Musk, and especially today's announcement that X will demand more privacy sensitive data from its users, have fuelled my decision.
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