Peter Mangs found guilty of racist killings
Anders Behring Breivik has confessed to the July 22 attacks but denies criminal guilt, accusing his victims of being “traitors” for embracing immigration laws he says will allow the Islamic colonization of Norway.
Peter Mangs, sometimes called the "racist sniper," was today convicted on counts of murder and attempted murder, the AFP reported.
Mangs specifically targeted immigrants from 2003, when he murdered an Iranian-born man in his apartment, to November 2010, when he was captured, Reuters reported.
Mangs launched an assault on the city of Malmo with sniper fire from 2009-2010, a city where 40 percent of its 300,000 citizens are “first or second generation immigrants,” according to the AP.
A court statement quoted by the AFP said the court found "convincing evidence that Peter Mangs has committed 13 (of the 20) crimes he was charged with, including two murders [and] four attempted murders."
Mangs' conviction closely follows the one-year anniversary of the Anders Behring Breivik killings in Norway. Breivik, an extreme right-wing terrorist, shot and killed 69 people at a summer camp on the island of Utoya and killed eight with a bomb in Oslo.
As The New York Times suggested, Mangs and Breivik's actions were similarly motivated by extreme anti-immigration, anti-multicultural, and racist beliefs.