Jon Magnus, the chief foreign correspondent of Oslo's VG newspaper, was sitting at his desk finishing a comment article when the bomb's blast wave blew him off his chair.
"It was 3.26 in the afternoon," he said. "Suddenly the whole building was shaking. It was like it was dancing. There was glass flying through the newsroom. "I was on the far side of the building from where the prime minister's office is. The entire glass front of our building was blown out."
Located a few hundred metres from the little square at Einar Gerhardsen Place which separates the building housing the ministry of health and the offices of the prime minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg, the explosion struck the side of the glass-fronted newspaper offices closest to the cluster of government buildings.
The blast shattered what had been a quiet afternoon in Oslo's holiday season, when most people in the capital were preparing to leave for the weekend.
It came months after Norway's state security services warned of the increased risk of jihad-inspired terrorism in Norway, a country that has had almost no modern experience of mass terror. It is not confirmed that the attacks are jihadist.
"Even though I was on the far side of our newsroom from where the explosion occurred," said Magnus, "the air pressure was so enormous it knocked me off my chair. At first I thought the explosion was inside our offices. I thought the bomb had exploded in our newsroom."
The bomb had not exploded in VG but several hundred metres away, the explosion so intense, added Magnus, that when he ventured outside in its immediate aftermath he could see walls had been ripped away and government buildings were burning.
"When I reached the blown-out windows closest to the explosion I could see the prime minister's office on fire. I could see we were right in the middle of the explosion. When I ran out of the building it was complete chaos. I could hear people screaming and see people covered in blood and what looked like corpses, lifeless people with their faces covered. I counted four or five.
"Before we left our own offices we had a pair of binoculars and we could see in the health department what seemed to be bodies hanging out of the windows. We could see into some of the floors and could see people also inside, what appeared to be bodies.
"We have a cafeteria in our basement. The tables in there were all covered in blood."
What precisely had happened Magnus and his fellow colleagues tried to piece together in the immediate aftermath, as some of the first people on the scene.
"There were two badly damaged cars close to the prime minister's office," said Magnus. "One of them had its wheels in the air. Eyewitnesses told us they had seen a black car with four people in it speeding away from the site of the blast but whether that means they were involved and escaping can't be confirmed.
"The damage was enormous," he added. "There was a 10-storey building with all the bricks ripped off. Hundreds, maybe thousands of windows smashed for 10 blocks away from where the explosion happened. Seven hundred yards maybe. I could see floors on the ministry of health burning heavily and the two bottom floors of the prime minister's office – where there is a glass foyer – just blown through so you could see the other side. It was literally hanging on its beams."
Another witness, Kjersti Vedun, said: "People ran in panic … I counted at least 10 injured people."
Ole Tommy Pedersen was standing at a bus stop 100 metres from the government high-rise when the explosion occurred. "I saw three or four injured people being carried out of the building a few minutes later," he told the Associated Press.
Photographs showed several bloody figures lying on the ground close to Stoltenberg's office. Others showed survivors walking through the ruins of Oslo's government district, past walls of shattered windows, frames sucked in by the vacuum caused by the huge blast.
The sense of a country suddenly under siege was redoubled within a few hours as reports began to emerge of an attack by a gunman, reportedly dressed as a policeman, on a youth camp being attended by members of Stoltenberg's party outside Oslo, raising fears that the Mumbai-style attack warned of for so long by intelligence services in Europe, had been mounted where it was least expected – in Norway, perhaps chosen as a soft target.
It was a secondary attack that seemed to confirm it was Stoltenberg himself – who had been working at home – and his party who were the intended victims.
VG broke the news that a gunman had opened fire at Utøya and anti-terror units were being dispatched to the scene. Stoltenberg underlined the sense of sudden crisis and panic in Norway, informing his countrymen on television that because of the threat he could not tell them where he was.
"This is very serious," Stoltenberg told Norwegian TV2 television in a phone call. "Even though we have prepared for this type of situation."
Speaking again after the shooting at the island youth camp where he had been due to speak on Saturday, Stoltenberg added: "There is a critical situation at Utøya."
Labour spokesman Per Gunnar Dahl told WAP that some 700 people, mostly teenagers between 14 and 18, were assembled for the camp. "This is a terror attack. It is the most violent event to strike Norway since world war two," said a shocked Geir Bekkevold, an opposition parliamentarian for the Christian Peoples party.
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