OSLO (AFP).- The youth wing of Norway's Labour Party proposed Thursday to move the location of a controversial memorial for the victims of Anders Behring Breivik's 2011 massacre after local residents sued the state.

The planned memorial, entitled "Memory Wound", would see a wide slit cut into a strip of land near the island of Utoya where most of Breivik's 77 victims were killed.

But about 20 locals, some of whom helped save lives during the massacre, sued the state in June to block the project, arguing it would harm the local community and landscape.

They see the planned memorial as too invasive and too close to their homes.

Now, the Labour Party's youth wing and a support group for the victims' families have proposed moving the location in a bid to avoid a legal battle.

"We ... feel that we cannot stay on the sidelines and watch a difficult process become even more difficult by entering into a humiliating and unworthy trial," Mani Hussaini said at a press conference held at the new proposed location, on the shores of Tyrifjorden lake where the ferry departs for Utoya.

The new location is just a few hundred metres (yards) away from the original one.
Norway's Minister of Communal Affairs and Modernisation, Jan Tore Sanner, said the state would consider the proposal.

But residents said they may also reject the second location.

"Off the bat, we can't say that this is a good solution," Jorn Overby told Norwegian television, though he said locals were willing to have a dialogue with authorities.

Utoya was the scene of Breivik's gun rampage on July 22, 2011. He spent more than an hour shooting at hundreds of people gathered for a summer camp organised by the Labour Party's youth wing, killing 69 of them.

He had earlier killed eight others by blowing up a bomb outside a government building in Oslo.

The 37-year-old right-wing extremist is serving a 21-year prison sentence that can be extended indefinitely.


© Agence France-Presse