OSLO — Sunday was a day of remembrance and self-examination for Norway, a small country shaken by the massacre of at least 93 of its people, many of them children, by one of its own.

The royal family and average citizens alike, some traveling long distances, came to a memorial service for the dead in the Oslo Cathedral. Long lines of people of all ages and colors waited patiently and quietly, some of them crying, to lay flowers or light candles at the spreading blanket of bouquets in front of the cathedral. Someone propped up a radio on a post so those waiting could listen to the service inside.

At the same time, the Norwegian police and security services faced numerous questions about their slow response to the reports of shooting on the island of Utoya, where the country’s governing Labor Party was holding its annual political summer camp, considered Norway’s nursery school for future leaders. The police took an hour to arrive on the island after the first reports, and officials said that it was hard to find boats and that their helicopters were only capable of surveillance, not of shooting down the killer.

Anders Behring Breivik, 32, the only suspect arrested, admits to the shootings on Utoya and the fatal bombing of government offices in Oslo, his lawyer, Geir Lippestad, told Norwegian news media, but rejects “criminal responsibility.” Mr. Lippestad said that Mr. Breivik insists that he acted alone, and alone wrote his mammoth manifesto — rambling from a hostile historical look at Islam to recipes (and price lists) for bomb manufacture to his family’s pressure on him to date.