Questions crack Breivik's militia claims

He refused to give details, including when questioned about a meeting in London when the group was supposedly founded.

“It is not in my interest to shed light on details that could lead to arrests,” he said refusing to comment on the group’s other members.

Prosecutors believe that the “Knights Templar” group that Breivik described in an online manifesto as “a nationalist military order and military/criminal tribunal” doesn’t exist.

Breivik said police had not done a good enough job in uncovering it.

“In principle it is not an organisation in a conventional sense,” he said. The group consists of “independent cells,” he added, “and therefore in the long term will be a leaderless organisation.”

The issue is of key importance in determining Breivik’s sanity, and whether he is sent to prison or compulsory psychiatric care for the bomb-and-shooting massacre last July.

Breivik claims to have carried out the attacks on behalf of the organisation, which he described in the 1,500-page compendium he posted online before the attacks as a militant nationalist group fighting a Muslim colonisation of Europe.

Prosecutor Inga Bejer Engh pressed him about details on the group, its members and its meetings.

Breivik claimed to have met a Serb “war hero” living in exile during a trip to Liberia in 2002, but he refused to identify him.

“What is it you’re getting at?” Breivik told the prosecutor, then answered the question himself, saying prosecutors want to “sow doubt over whether the KT network exists.”

Breivik also refused to give details on what he claims was the founding session of the “Knights Templar” in London in 2002. He conceded, however, that he embellished somewhat in the manifesto when he described members at the founding session as “brilliant political and military tacticians of Europe.”

Breivik testified that he had used “pompous” language and described them instead as “people with great integrity.”

Ms Bejer Engh challenged him on whether the meeting had taken place at all.

“Yes, there was a meeting in London,” Breivik insisted.

“It’s not something you have made up?” she countered.

“I haven’t made up anything. What is in the compendium is correct,” he said.

Breivik’s defensive answers contrasted with the assertive posture he took on Tuesday when he read a prepared statement to the court, boasting that he had carried out the most “spectacular” attack by a nationalist militant since the Second World War.

“I think what we are watching is the revelation of a sort of fantasy or a dream,” said Christin Bjelland, deputy head of a support group for survivors of the July 22 massacre.

Breivik admits he detonated a bomb outside the government headquarters in Oslo, killing eight people, then drove to Utoya island outside the capital and massacred 69 people in a shooting spree at the governing Labor Party’s youth summer camp on Utoya island.

He said his victims – mostly teenagers – were not innocent but legitimate targets because they were representatives of a “multiculturalist” regime he claims is deconstructing Norway’s national identity by allowing immigration.

Breivik said Norway's prison terms were "pathetic", claiming the death penalty or a full acquittal were the "only logical outcomes" for his massacre.

He said he does not fear death and that militant nationalists in Europe have a lot to learn from al Qaida, including their methods and glorification of martyrdom.

“If I had feared death I would not have dared to carry out this operation,” he said.

“I view 21 years in prison as a pathetic sentence,” Breivik said.

Asked by the prosecutor if he would rather have received a death penalty - which does not exist in current Norwegian law, he said: “I don’t wish for it but I would have respected that decision.

“There are only two outcomes in this case that I had respected, that is the death penalty or acquittal.”