Iranian-born Norwegian found guilty of attack at Oslo LGBT+ festival in 2022, sentenced to 30 years in prison

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — An Iranian-born Norwegian was found guilty of terrorism on Thursday in a 2022 attack on an LGBTQ+ festival in Oslo and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Two people were killed and nine seriously injured filming at three locationsmainly in front of the London Pub, a popular gay bar, on June 25, 2022.

The Oslo District Court said Zaniar fired ten shots from a machine gun and eight shots from a pistol into the crowd. It said Matapour had pledged allegiance to the terrorist group Islamic State and had been “radicalized for several years.”

His 30-year prison sentence was the longest sentence in Norway since the terror laws were changed in 2015.

Matapour can apply for parole after 20 years, but will only be released if he is no longer deemed dangerous.

Prosecutor Aud Kinsarvik Gravås called it “the right result” and “a historically severe punishment.” Matapour’s lawyer Marius Dietrichson said it was “a severe punishment” and that no decision had been made whether to appeal.

Espen Evjenth, who was hit in the forehead by a bullet in the London Pub, told Norwegian news agency NTB it was “a huge relief”.

Extensive video footage of the attack was presented in court. The verdict was not read out on site, but transmitted electronically. Matapour will have the verdict read out in prison, the court said.

Matapour was overpowered and arrested by passersby after the attack. Following the attack, a Pride parade was cancelled because police said they could not guarantee safety.

The shooting shocked Norway, which, while it has a relatively low crime rate, has experienced a number of lone-wolf attacks in recent decades, including one of the worst mass shootings in Europe. In 2011 a right-wing extremist killed 69 people on the island of Utøya after detonating a bomb in Oslo that killed eight people.

Six days before the attack, the Norwegian foreign intelligence service E-Tjenesten had learned from an undercover investigator that a possible attack was to be expected in a Nordic country and passed the information on to the domestic intelligence service.

Matapour had pleaded not guilty. He was examined by a court-appointed psychiatrist who concluded that he was mentally healthy at the time of the attack.

During the trial, both the prosecution and the defense agreed that Matapour had fired into the crowd, and there was no doubt that the shooting was carried out for terrorist reasons. However, Dietrichson had requested an acquittal because his client had been provoked into the attack by an E-Tjenesten agent who was posing as a high-ranking member of the terrorist militia “Islamic State”.

The court stated that “it is clear that E-Tjenesten’s actions did not constitute an illegal provocation” and “did not provoke an act of terrorism that would not otherwise have been committed.”

The trial began in March and ended on May 16.

Four other people are suspected of being involved in the case, but none of them have been officially charged.