Norway gunman should have killed himself instead: father

"I think that ultimately he should have taken his own life rather than kill so many people," Jens Breivik said in the interview yesterday recorded in Cournanel in the south of France where the retired diplomat lives.

"I feel pain and shame -- and I will have to live with that until the end of my days," added Jens Breivik, who divorced his now-notorious son's mother when Behring Breivik was just one year old.

With no contact with his son for 15 years now, he said: "I will never have any more contact with him."

Filmed from behind so as to conceal his identity during the interview on a sunny terrace, with French police standing in the background, Breivik agreed these were strong words to utter about a child.

"But when I think of what happened, I'm filled with despair," he said. "I still don't understand how something like this could happen. No-one normal could do that."

"He comes across as an extremist," the father said, adding: "He must be", mentally ill.

"There is no other way to explain it. A normal person would never do such a thing." In a 1,500-page tract produced over a decade by Behring Breivik, the mass killer said he maintained "good relations" with his father and step-mother until his teenage years, but that an attempt at reconciliation five years ago failed because his father was "not mentally ready," partly blaming health reasons.

He said he wants laws changed "to re-introduce the father as the authority figure and family head."

That way, "fathers will regain the domestic courage to teach their children discipline, moral codes and traditional codexes without the fear of persecution or discrimination from the mother or the cultural Marxist regime."

In an autobiographical passage of his manifesto, he lays into his stepfather Tore as a "living manifestation of the complete breakdown of sexual moral," alleging hundreds of sexual partners and exposure to sexually-transmitted diseases.

"He is a very primitive sexual beast, but at the same time a very likable and good guy."
Claiming that a sister also contracted herpes, which he said subsequently led to meningitis, he wrote: "Both my sister and my mother have not only shamed me but they have shamed themselves and our family."

He said his was "a family that was broken in the first place due to secondary effects of the feministic/sexual revolution."