Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg should resign to take responsibility for his failure to prevent the bombing of his office last year that killed eight people, Verdens Gang, Norway’s largest tabloid newspaper, said.

The July 22 Commission, which published its 500-page report yesterday, also found that the police could have moved faster to halt the shooting on Utoeya Island.

“He should have the decency to resign,” VG wrote in an editorial today.

The probe into the mass hate killings by Anders Behring Breivik found there were “unacceptable” delays in police response, adding that the perpetrator could have been stopped earlier. Breivik on July 22 last year massacred 69 people --some as young as 14 --- at a Labor Party youth camp on Utoeya, after earlier detonating a car bomb by the prime minister’s office in Oslo, killing eight. The group found that the bomb attack could have been prevented if already adopted security measures had been implemented.

“Public institutions that should have protected the country and its people failed. The government could not have been presented with a more devastating verdict,” VG said.

Stoltenberg “regrets deeply” the failures in the police’s response and the delays in the implementation of adopted measures to secure the prime minister’s office, he told a press conference yesterday, where he was pressed on whether he had considered resigning.

To contact the reporter on this story: Josiane Kremer in Oslo at jkremer4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonas Bergman at jbergman@bloomberg.net