Breivik to dispute insane ruling

A far-right militant who killed 77 people in Norway last year will use his trial to challenge a diagnosis that he is criminally insane, something that would be "worse than death", excerpts of a letter he wrote showed yesterday.

The trial of Anders Behring Breivik, who gunned down 69 at a Labour Party youth camp after detonating a car bomb in central Oslo that killed eight, starts in Oslo on 16 April.

In November, two court-appointed psychiatrists deemed the 33-year-old was psychotic and paranoid schizophrenic at the time of the attacks, which would normally mean he could not be sentenced to prison.

In a 38-page letter he wrote in jail and sent to various Norwegian media – of which extracts were published in the daily VG yesterday – Breivik said that being deemed criminally insane was unbearable to him.

"This is the worst thing that could have happened to me as it is the ultimate humiliation," he wrote. "To send a political activist to a mental hospital is more sadistic and evil than to kill him! It is a fate worse than death."

Breivik has said he committed the attacks on 22 July to protect Norway from multiculturalism.