Dr Christine Cheng on why many thought the Oslo and Utoya attacks were committed by al Qaeda

Late on 22 July, Christine Cheng added a post to her blog about the attacks in Oslo and Utoya that day, based on the assumption that al Quaeda was resonspible.

The day after, she wrote: Almost every news site, blog, and expert said it was al Qaeda. If, like me, you turn to the media when youre looking for breaking news, it would have been hard to reach any other conclusion... And so I fell prey to the spell: Was it authorized by al Qaeda leaders or was it al Qaeda-inspired, like the Fort Hood shooting was? What, exactly, was the motivation? Were the terrorists homegrown? Well, it turns out that the terrorist was homegrown all right: a lone white male, Norwegian, right-wing Christian. Today, Im wondering how I jumped so easily to the al Qaeda conclusion.

Christines blog posts, exploring how so many people came to the wrong conclusion, can be read here and here.

These posts were then picked up by Al Jazeera, and she was interviewed for their Listening Post programme (30 July), which can be seen here (Christine appears about 8 minutes in).

(Photograph courtesy of Henrik Lied.)