Mal Fletcher comments

Mal Fletcher

'Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,' says Marcellus in Hamlet, a play set in that nation's famed Kronborg castle.

Last week, the citizens of Oslo may have awoken wondering where the rot, the source of a terrible tragedy, lies within their nation.

I have visited Norway and its capital many times over the past 20 years, especially as I lived in nearby Copenhagen for a decade. Norway is a nation blessed with stunning scenery and a largely laid-back lifestyle. It is also one of the world's richest nations, enjoying revenues from huge oceanic oil reserves.

Now, however, the nation mourns the deaths of 91 people killed after a downtown bomb attack, followed by a shooting massacre in an island youth camp.

Watching the British news coverage of this event has been illuminating, not least for the fact that many pundits opted first to search for an international Islamist terror link in the tragedy.

Police have taken into custody the man they believe responsible, a 32-year-old blonde Norwegian with links not to Islamists but to far-right nationalist groups.

Yet, strangely, even as this became clearer at least one prominent TV news channel ran an onscreen stripe suggesting that he may have visited 'fundamentalist Christian websites'.

Still, it seems, the inference is that a terror tragedy like this one must have at least some religious overtone.

In fact, what seems to be emerging - it is still early days - is that the alleged killer's motivation may have been political rather than religious.

He may well turn out to have visited extremist religious sites, but his choice of bombing target is revealing.

Oslo's government office buildings are not situated in the busiest part of the town. To have seven people die in a bomb blast is devastating enough, but things could have been much worse had the bomber chosen to target an even more populated shopping sector.

The bombing may well not have been about general indiscriminate killing but, in the twisted logic of a deranged person, inflicting damage on specific political ideals or the general political system.

This seems to be supported by the alleged attacker's choice of youth camp on the island of Utøya, 40km north-west of Oslo.

There he savagely gunned down more than 80 young people, most of them in their teens, at an event sponsored by the ruling Labour party. They had come together because of a shared interest in politics.