Jens Breivik, the father of the mass murderer Anders Breivik who went on a killing rampage in Norway last year, plans to publish a book about his son a year after the 2011 twin attacks on the Utoya Island and Oslo that left a total of 77 people dead, Norway’s P4 Radio reported on Thursday.
The radio cited the 76-year-old Jens Breivik as saying that he had already written a manuscript about his son, but has been turned away by Norway’s largest publishing houses.
However, the country’s major publishers said they had not received any proposal from Jens Breivik, P4 said.
“It's interesting to see what kind of script it might be, we could just publish it in a normal way,” Aschehougs’s Publishing Editor Kari Spjeldnes told P4.
“It must be readable and take what will be important to most people into account …Naturally, it will shed light on the essentials in this awful case,” the radio station quoted Spjeldnes as saying.
Breivik, 33, has confessed to murdering 69 people at a youth summer camp on Utoya Island and another eight in a bomb attack in Oslo on July 22, 2011, but pleaded innocent to charges of terrorism, saying he was defending Norway from multiculturalism and immigration.
Two days after the attacks, his father, a former diplomat who claims to have lost contact with his son 18 years ago, said that when he recognized his son as the killer whose photo was aired by the world’s media he wished Anders Brevik “had taken his own life, too.”
If deemed mentally ill, Breivik, who is to be sentenced on August 24, may spend the rest of his life in a psychiatric ward. If the court finds him sane, the killer will serve a maximum of 21 years in prison.
