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Afghan flees war zone home, shot 4 times in Norway

HONEFOSS, Norway — Hussein Kazemi has faced danger many times before. Maybe that’s why the teenager still can smile as he sits in his hospital bed, bullet wounds in both legs and an arm, and images of a crazed gunman in his head.

The asylum-seeker from Afghanistan, who sought safe harbor in Norway two years ago, is one of dozens still hospitalized after a gun rampage on an island campsite killed at least 86 people — mostly teens and young adults. A Norwegian with anti-immigration views has been arrested in the attack, which left scores wounded and several presumed missing somewhere in the water.

“I experienced many dangers in Afghanistan. But this is the worst experience I will ever have in my life,” the 19-year-old said in a bedside interview Sunday.

Many immigrants or children of immigrants were at the camp, an annual event for Norway’s up-and-coming liberal Labor Party activists. Kazemi said the shooting began soon after he finished playing a soccer game featuring a veritable United Nations of fellow party activists from Afghanistan, Georgia, the Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iraq, Sri Lanka, Somalia and other countries.

Norway’s liberal government has traditionally been relatively open to asylum-seekers of war-torn states. That’s a central complaint in the epic online rant published by the suspected gunman, 32-year-old Norwegian nationalist Anders Behring Breivik, who proclaims a vision of a Europe wiped clean of Muslims.

Kazemi said the gunman didn’t appear to be targeting campers of a particular hue or religious wardrobe.

“He seemed to want to kill everyone. No one was to be spared,” he said in comments partly translated by his older stepbrother from his native Afghan language of Dari.

Kazemi was in the camp cafeteria Friday when he heard commotion outside: sounds like firecrackers, then screams. Others more aware of what was happening fell on the floor.

“So I threw myself down too, but I didn’t know why.”

Then he saw the gunman. People around him fell from gunshots. He joined survivors in a mad 10-minute sprint into the forest outside. It was only when they reached a rocky shoreline, puffing from exhaustion, that friends stared, frightened, at Kazemi. He’d been shot at least once, most likely back in the initial cafeteria melee.

When asked if he now considered Norway a hostile place to stay, Kazemi offered an emphatic “no.” He said he had survived many risks in his native city of Herat, northwestern Afghanistan, and never doubted he could survive this too.

“You have only one life and you must take the good with the bad,” he said. “There will always be both. Life is like that. There are ups and downs. In a dangerous place you always have a chance to live, and in a safe place you always have a chance of being killed. It’s destiny and you cannot avoid it.”