Prosecutors began their closing arguments Thursday in the trial of Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in attacks last July, and were to reveal if they want him held responsible for his actions, AFP reported.


Prosecutors Inga Bejer Engh and Svein Holden were expected to speak for several hours, at the end of which they will ask the court to either send Breivik to prison or a closed psychiatric care unit.


“July 22, 2011 was and is still a national trauma. Thousands of people were directly or indirectly affected,” Bejer Engh told the Oslo district court.


She cautioned that many of the most pressing questions in the case, including how “a citizen became a murder machine”, probably would not be sufficiently answered to satisfy those affected.


“I find it difficult to find words to describe the 80 minutes he spent with only one goal: to kill as many people as possible,” Bejer Engh said.


Breivik has told the court his acts were “cruel but necessary” to protect Norway from a wave of multiculturalism and a “Muslim invasion”.


Bejer Eng said that instead of instigating fear with his descriptions of the alleged Knights Templar network prepared to carry out other attacks, Breivik had instead painted a “tragic picture” of a young man so eager to appear important that he dreamed up a non-existing network.


She recalled that “the dead on Utoeya were mainly young people”, with 56 of the 69 under the age of 20.


The prosecution will base their request to the court on psychiatric evaluations of the 33-year-old rightwing extremist’s mental health which have sharply contradicted each other.


In the formal indictment presented in March, in which Breivik was charged with “acts of terror”, the two prosecutors called for him to be sent to a high-security psychiatric unit, but left the door open to change their minds if new information were to surface about his mental health.


They adopted that line based on the sole psychiatric evaluation that had been completed at the time which diagnosed Breivik as insane, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and therefore not responsible for his actions.