Norwegian man gets 21 years Imprisonment for slaying & mosque attack
Thursday, June 11th: A Norwegian court has sentenced a man to 21 years in prison for killing his teenage step-sister and firing on a mosque, with a minimum of 14 years to serve.
Last August, 22-year-old Philip Manshaus opened fire on the Al-Noor Islamic Center in Bairam, west of the capital Oslo. Several shots were fired inside the mosque, but no one was seriously injured. Manshaus was captured before police arrived.
The attack was described as an act of far-right racist terrorism. Police have found evidence that Manshaus was infected with Brenton Trent, who is accused of carrying out deadly attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019. Trent has pleaded guilty to 51 counts of murder in New Zealand.
The minimum sentence for Manshaus is 14 years, which is 10 years more than the minimum sentence in the case of right-wing extremist Anders Behring Brook. A 2011 attack in Norway by Anders Brock killed 77 people. Norway increased the minimum punishment for such cases in 2015.
When Manshaus entered the mosque last August, he was armed with heavy weapons, but was overpowered by Muhammad Rafiq, a 65-year-old retired Pakistan Air Force officer. They captured Manshaus and managed to disarm him.
Shortly after the attack, the body of the attacker’s 17-year-old Chinese-born half-sister, Johan Zhangjia, of Hansen, was found in a house in Bairam.
Judge Anika Lindstrom ruled that Manshaus visited neo-Nazi Web sites that contained pages calling for a “race-based” civil war. He added that he had entered the mosque “with the intention of killing as many Muslims as possible”.
In court, Manshaus did not apologize for what he did and praised Christchurch’s killer, who posted a video of the mosque shooting live on the Internet. Manshaus himself was wearing a helmet with a camera at the time of the attack and filmed the attack on the mosque, but failed to broadcast video of the attack on the Internet.
In court, Manshaus named Adolf Hitler and Brooke as his role models, talked about the so-called “genocide of the European people” and called the Holocaust a myth. On May 7, he used a hand gesture used by right-wing extremists.
When he appeared in court for the first time last year after being subdued in a mosque, he had bruises on his face and neck and bruises on his eyes. Norwegian broadcaster NRK says he used his father’s rifle and shotgun in the attack.
The court rejected the defense counsel’s argument that Manish House was not mentally fit and therefore ineligible for trial. In addition to the prison sentence, Manshaus was ordered to pay compensation to the families of the victims and to pay the legal costs of one million Norwegian kroner.
