Young Iraqi Kurdish Bano Rashid 18 Years Old Killed in the Norway Island Massacre

In Nesodden, south of Oslo, the first of the funerals was held, for Bano Rashid, an 18-year-old woman who came to Norway in 1996 with her family fleeing Kurdistan in northern Iraq. She was shot dead at the summer camp.

Rashid was the first to be buried in a newly consecrated Muslim section of the cemetery by the picturesque stone-and-wood church, built in 1175. Several hundred mourners followed her casket to the grave, led by a Lutheran priest and an imam.

“We have many Muslims living here now, so she will not be alone there for long,” the Islamic cleric, Senaid Kobilica of Bosnia, said of the new area of the cemetery.

“Seeing the imam and the priest walking together from the church was a mighty image — the strongest message that can be sent to counter the forces we have been witness to,” Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said.

On Utoeya island Rashid had lent a pair of rubber boots to former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who spoke to the youths before departing on a boat before the shooting.

In a second funeral, Ismail Haji Ahmed, 19, was buried near Hamar, north of Oslo. Ahmed, a dancer who appeared in a television talent show this year, was one of three in his family who were at Utoeya, parliamentarian Thomas Breen said.

“We have lost one of our most beautiful roses,” he told Reuters. The two other family members survived.

Police interrogated Breivik on Friday, for the second time since he was arrested, and said he was “strikingly calm”. He could face a lifetime in jail.

Muslims welcomed Stoltenberg’s calls for unity.

“It was very good, very open, very inclusive for the Muslim community,” said Ahmed Ali, an Iraqi-born immigrant, aged 23.

Earlier, the Labour party held a sombre memorial in a hall in central Oslo with calls for more democracy and tolerance. Delegates held aloft red roses.

Flanked by an imam and a bishop from Norway’s Lutheran state church, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg attended a ceremony in Oslo’s main mosque at 1330 GMT — the time Breivik detonated a homemade car bomb in central Oslo on July 22.

http://www.torontosun.com/2011/07/29/norway-to-hold-first-funeral-after-killings
http://www.spiegel.de/international/