Beredskapstroppen (call sign Delta), is the Norwegian police’s intervention team and counter-terrorism unit. Its members are trained to perform dangerous operations such as high-risk arrests and hostage situations. The team members are recruited from the ordinary police force. It is organizationally part of Oslo Police District, but is responsible for the whole country, including oil installations in the North Sea.
The unit is similar to GIGN in France, GSG 9 in Germany and FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team in the United States. Members spend half their time training and preparing for missions and the remaining participating in ordinary law enforcement work in Oslo. For training in close quarters combat they often use a specially built city inside Rena Military Camp close to Rena which originally was built for training the Telemark Battalion and military special forces.
Delta conduct in average almost one armed operation every day. In 2004, for instance, they conducted 422 armed missions and only fired their weapons twice.
Members of the unit have been deployed in the multinational police unit, Special Team Six many times. Team Six has most notably served in Kosovo. One of the unit’s most important task was to arrest war criminals. According to one of the Delta operators, during a rescue mission, grenades and bullets flew over their heads while Team Six rescued 50-60 persons from furious Albanians. This incident was a rescue of United Nations personnel trapped in a building. Team Six was commanded by a Norwegian operator from the Emergency Response Unit during this mission and during the period January–July 2004. Beredskapstroppen has had personnel deployed in Team Six ever since its foundation
One of the unit’s most dramatic missions was the Torp hostage crisis, where an elderly couple and two police officers were taken hostages by two criminals. In the end of the two-day drama, the Emergency Response Unit executed a rescue operation rescuing all of the hostages and killing one hostage taker and arresting the other. In the aftermath of the fatal NOKAS robbery, the Emergency Response Unit arrested many suspects involved with the robbery. Since October 2006, Delta has focused their operations against gang crime in the capital of Oslo and arrested many criminals and seized many weapons used by the gangs.
Beredskapstroppen was called to Utøya island and subsequently apprehended Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks in Oslo and Utøya on 22 July 2011. In the aftermath, they received further anti-terrorist training from Ireland’s national police tactical intervention unit, also named the Emergency Response Unit.
