Introduction

On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik set off a bomb in the city centre of Oslo, killing eight people before going on to massacre a further 69 people on Utøya Island. Norway was shaken, and a key focus of the Gjørv Commission, set up by the Norwegian government to review this tragedy, was the question of whether the killings could have been prevented. The Gjørv Commission’s highly critical report lists a number of deficiencies in the response and led to the resignation of Norway’s chief of police.