Footage of the chilling moment a man entered a Norwegian supermarket armed with a bow and arrow and started firing at people has been released.
Espen Andersen Bråthen went on trial yesterday for the murder of five people and attempted murder of 11 more on October 13, 2021.
The 38-year-old pleaded guilty before a judge as the court heard how he stalked the streets of Kongsberg with dozens of arrows before unleashing a deadly attack on innocent shoppers in a Co-Op Extra Supermarket.
Bråthen, who was listed by Norwegian security services as a person of concern as early as 2015, fired at his victims before hacking them to death with a hunting knife.
In total, he killed five people aged 52-78, including four women.
CCTV footage, released by police as his trial began, shows Bråthen entering the supermarket with a large knife strapped to his waist and armed with a bow and a quiver of arrows.
Wearing khaki trousers and a white vest top he can be seen repeatedly loading the bow and firing at his victims.
Rigoberto Villarroel, 48, a police officer, was in the Co-Op Extra store with his family when Bråthen began shooting. He was hit in the back but survived the attack.
After firing his arrows in the supermarket, Bråthen discarded the weapon and ran to Hytegatten – one of the most historic streets in Kongsberg.
There he fatally stabbed Gunnar Sauve and Liv Borge, a married couple both aged 75 in their apartment overlooking the Numedalslågen River which flows through the town.
He then killed Gun Marith Madsen, a 78-year-old who walked with the aid of a zimmer frame, in her ground-floor apartment at the end of the same street.
Neighbours said two men living in the flat above Ms Madsen heard a disturbance and rushed to help but were unable to save her.
Hanne Englund, 56, a ceramic artist was also murdered by Bråthen after he managed to enter her studio home on Hytegatten.
Andrea Meyer, 52, from Hamburg, was Bråthen’s final victim and died in a pool of blood outside Ms Englund’s home.
Bråthen’s lawyers argue he is insane and should be sentenced to compulsory mental health care in a psychiatric facility rather than sent to prison.
They told the court told he thought he was going blind and believed killing people would lead to him being ‘born again’.
‘I got the idea that in order to be born again, in a good place, I had to kill,’ Bråthen told the court.
‘I thought, now I can go out and kill before I go blind.
‘There is no danger of this happening again, because now I know that I will not go blind and that it is wrong to kill.
‘I regret what I have done and wish that the people I killed were still alive. I very much regret it.’
Bråthen, described as an ‘unstable loner’ by court documents and neighbours, says he has converted to Islam, however, police dispute this and say he is mentally ill.
The PST – Norway’s equivalent of MI5 – first contacted him in 2015, more than six years before his lethal attack.
In December 2017, two days after he posted a video online talking about his conversion to Islam, for which he was reported to the authorities, police conducted a ‘concern’ interview.
PST’s evaluation of Bråthen at the time was that ‘he was not motivated by religion or ideology but was seriously mentally ill’.
Childhood friends reportedly told police Bråthen had developed mental health problems in his teens and later became disconnected from society.
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