A TV cameraman who captured the only known images of the gunman during his shooting rampage at a political youth camp in Norway says he had no idea at the time that the killer was in his viewfinder. Marius Arnesen, a cameraman for Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, was in a helicopter hovering more than 200 meters over Utoya island, where panicked youth were being massacred as they fled into the water on Friday. At the time, Arnesen says, he didn't realize the scale of the disaster, in which at least 68 people were mortally wounded. "We were circling the island taking shots of the island," he told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "It looked empty, so at first I thought police had evacuated the island. Then we saw people swimming and floating in the water. And then we started slowly realizing what was going on."
His images show a man in dark clothing surrounded by bodies piled up on the shore and in the water. NRK released them to other media after blurring out the victims so they could not be identified.
The fact that the NRK helicopter arrived before the police SWAT team that arrested Breivik has sparked criticism over the police response. Relatives of people on the island have also questioned whether the NRK helicopter put people in graver danger.
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