A number of employees still feel unsafe at work after the bomb attack on the government headquarter last summer, said department head Ingelin Killengreen when she testified in court on Thursday.
Killengreen first spoke briefly about the people who died in the bombing on July 22. Then she went on to speak in detail about the consequences the explosion has had for employees in the affected government buildings.
"This has caused an extremely high level of stress among the people who were in the government headquarters when the bomb went off," Killengreen explained.
Killengreen has been the department head for the Ministry of Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs since April 2011. The ministry also oversees the government's role as an employer, as well as its staff.
Thursday she explained that although most offices have been moved at this point, several employees still lack a sense of security at their workplace. "We have to invest a lot of time in taking care of the employees," she says.
- Norway is a small country, and I have yet to meet one person who doesn't know somebody who died on July 22, explained the department head. Several government employees also lost their own children in the killings at Utøya.
Killengreen could not yet give an estimate of the financial consequences of the explosion. "What has been allocated and spent so far constitutes about NOK 600 million, but new things are constantly being added to the list," she says.
The price tag for a new government headquarter will be somewhere between five to ten billion kroner, but Killengreen emphasizes that this is a rough estimate. The timeline for the new headquarters could be anything from 8-12 years.
The Court will on Friday move on to hear reports of the massacre at Utøya, and be given details from the autopsy reports on the first nine of the 69 victims there.
(NRK)(Picture Idg)
Julie Ryland
