Father of Norwegian mass killer Breivik fears his son getting ever more extreme

The father of Anders Behring Breivik, who massacred 77 people in central Oslo and at an island summer camp in 2011, said on Thursday his son’s fascist, anti-immigrant views seemed to be getting ever more extreme in jail. “It’s not nice being the father of a mass murderer,” former diplomat Jens Breivik, 78, told a news conference to launch an autobiography titled “My Fault?” He said the discovery that his son was the killer exceeded a parent’s worst nightmares. Breivik detonated a bomb in central Oslo on July 22, 2011, killing eight, then took a boat to an island where the ruling Labour Party were holding a summer camp and shot dead 69 more people, mostly teenagers.

I believe he is getting more and more extreme, maybe he will be more dangerous.

Jens Breivik

He was sentenced to 21 years in jail, the maximum in Norway, though the term can be extended if there is deemed to be a risk he would commit new crimes. Jens Breivik said, as a father, he nurtured only a “small hope” his son would ever show remorse. Anders Breivik, in a letter to his father, demanded that he should declare himself a fascist as a pre-condition for meeting and also denounced Anders’s grandparents for failing to side with Hitler’s Nazis who occupied Norway during the Second World War. Jens Breivik said he feared his son could influence other extremists from jail with his radical right-wing, anti-immigrant ideology. In the book, he agonizes over whether better parenting could have prevented the killings and said he regrets once saying he wished Anders dead. Earlier this month, Anders Breivik separately wrote a letter in which he indicated he was renouncing violence and willing to apologize but set up a string of conditions, including that he should be allowed to set up a fascist party.

He should be judged, it’s not up to me to judge.

Jens Breivik

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