Norway extremist pleas for funds to sue French authorities

Kristian Vikernes, the Norwegian far-right metal musician who was detained in France last month and released without charge, has called on the public to give him money to help sue the authorities for wrongful arrest.

Vikernes — who once served 16 years in prison in Norway for stabbing a fellow musician to death — was detained in the central French region of Correze with his French wife on suspicion he was plotting a “major terrorist act”.

But investigators found no evidence of a terror plot and the two were released, although Vikernes will be tried in Paris for “provoking racial hatred”, due to some of his online writings.

“Naturally we are angry… We want to sue the authorities for arresting us for no good reason whatsoever, doing so in the most brutal way possible and with children present,” the 40-year-old wrote Wednesday on his blog.

“The only problem is that we can not afford to sue them, and we see no other solution to this than to ask for help from you.”

He describes how police “shot our door open, traumatised our children, threw my pregnant wife and me in holding cells and kept us there for two-three days, placed our scared children in the care of their grand parents.”

He added that officers seized USB keys and hard drives, confiscated all the couple’s “firearms, ammo, many tools, decorative swords, my helmet, two spears, my wife’s flint knives… everything, all of this for no good reason whatsoever.”

Vikernes said that the grandparents had also tried to legally take the couple’s children away from them, although they ultimately failed.

At the time of his high-profile arrest last month, the interior ministry said that Vikernes was “close to the neo-Nazi movement” and could have been preparing a “major terrorist act”.

However Interior Minister Manuel Valls later conceded no specific target or project had been identified, but authorities had decided to “act before and not afterwards”.

Vikernes is a black metal musician notorious in Norway. He was sentenced to 21 years in prison for the 1993 murder of fellow musician Oeystein Aarseth, known as Euronymous.

Musicians and fans of black metal — an extreme sub-genre of heavy metal — often express anti-Christian views and were involved in the burning of more than 50 churches in Norway between 1992 and 1996.

Released after serving 16 years for the killing, Vikernes eventually settled in France in 2010.