Breivik said to have had too many contacts for a "lone wolf"

Some commentators are saying that Anders Behring Breivik (32), the man who has confessed to committing two terrorist attacks on 22 July in Norway, had a surprising number of contacts for someone detectives have labeled a “lone wolf”. During the past three years in particular, Breivik was remarkably diligent in his communications, according to the Austrian daily Die Presse. However, he rarely received the response he expected from those who received his “manifesto”. According to the Czech weekly Ekonom, Czech recipients of his e-mails considered them spam.

“Breivik was in contact with Belarusian and British nationalists, he actively posted to anti-Islamist websites and acquired his weapon legally. The image of this mass murderer as a ‘lone wolf’ who left practically no traces of himself is becoming more and more dubious,” Die Presse claims. The Norwegian daily Dagbladet has even come to the conclusion that the number of these facts means police should have investigated Breivik long ago.

Police should allegedly have been alarmed in particular by Breivik’s postings to some anti-Islamist websites. Dagbladet believes that had detectives taken notice earlier, they would have discovered his other activities that are only now coming to light.

The Norwegian assassin most probably found his foreign pen-pals through social networking sites and eventually sent them his extensive “manifesto”. In this way he acquired at least 10 email addresses in the Czech Republic. Ekonom reports it managed to connect with two of the Czech recipients of the manifesto, who evidently took no interest in the text. Both claim they considered Breivik’s e-mail to be “spam” and treated it as such.

“I only learned that message wasn’t just one of the many usual spams almost one week after the attacks, when people from newspapers in Denmark and Norway suddenly started writing to me,” claims a man named Aleš, who would only identify himself as living in a rural area. Police apparently have not yet contacted him.

Aleš believes he probably ended up in Breivik’s contact lists because he was a member of a group opposing Muslim immigrants for a while on Facebook. He claims to have never met Breivik.

Romana, a Czech college student, also believes Breivik most probably found her through Facebook. “I have a group that makes statements on the issue of immigrants listed among my favorite websites,” she told Ekonom. However, she stressed that she is not a member of any extremist group that Breivik might have supported.

Ekonom reports that the other Czech e-mail addresses to which Breivik sent his manifesto did not include the names of politicians or any other public figures. Most of them were private e-mail addresses ending in seznam.cz or volny.cz.