A Norwegian court has found a man guilty of carrying out a deadly gun attack at a gay bar in Oslo in 2022. The shooting took place during the city’s annual Pride celebrations.
Zanier Matapour killed two people and seriously injured nine others after opening fire into a crowd outside the London Pub, a popular gay bar in the Norwegian capital.
Conviction ‘a bif relief’ — head of victim support
The Oslo District Court said Matapour, fired 10 rounds with a machine gun and eight shots with a handgun into the crowd.
“This is a big relief,” the head of the support group for survivors and victims’ relatives, Espen Evjenth, told public broadcaster NRK. “This verdict is an important step to establish a common understanding in our society about what happened.”
Matapour had sworn allegiance to “Islamic State” — prosecutors
Matapour, who was born in Iran and immigrated to Norway as a child, had sworn allegiance to the so-called Islamic State (IS), prosecutors said.
During the course of the trial, both the prosecution and the defense agreed Matapour had fired into the crowd and there was no disputing that the attack had been motivated by terrorism.
Matapour’s lawyer, Marius Dietrichson, however, sought an acquittal, saying his client had been provoked to carry out the attack by a Danish intelligence agent posing as a high-ranking member of the IS terror group.
The shooting shocked Norway, which has a relatively low crime rate but has experienced so-called lone wolf attacks in recent decades, including one of Europe’s worst mass shootings at the hands of a right-wing extremist in 2011.
