Norway's minister of justice and police, Knut Storberget, resigned on Friday after months of intense pressure to explain shortcomings in the country's response to July attacks by a far-right fanatic that killed 77 people. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg replaced Storberget with Defence Minister Grete Faremo, a versatile Labour Party veteran, saying Storberget had long planned to leave for personal reasons but stayed on to complete a report to parliament on the attacks.
He acknowledged that Storborget shared some responsibility for what went wrong in the response to the July 22 bombing and shooting by anti-immigration militant Anders Behring Breivik. "It is clear that not everything functioned as well as it could have, and that is the reason we are now strengthening our capabilities," Stoltenberg told Reuters.
"We all have responsibility for what functioned well and the things that did not." He said Faremo, who served as justice minister in the 1990s, would take over a ministry in need of reorganisation, more resources and a clearer focus on emergency preparedness. Stoltenberg appointed Espen Barth Eide, a deputy minister in the Foreign Ministry, to replace Faremo as defence minister.
Storberget, who has three children and served six years as justice minister, was not immediately available for comment. On Thursday he told parliament that a government-appointed commission already at work should look closely at why it took more than an hour for police to arrest Breivik after he began shooting people at a Labour Party summer camp outside Oslo.
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