_{Photo Credit - Per Ole Hagen / Getty Images} 

Black metal's most iconic and grim story has just taken an unexpected turn 26 years after the fact; Mayhem bassist Necrobutcher has now revealed that he was also planning to kill the band's guitarist øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth before Varg Vikernes had done it himself.

In a new interview with Consequence of Sound - which was initially to talk about Mayhem's new album Daemon - Necrobutcher said of the dark events:

“OK, I can tell it right now, because I’ve been holding it in for many years, but actually I was on my way down to kill him myself. And when it happened, I saw the morning paper, thinking ‘F**k, I gotta get home to my place and get out all the weapons and drugs and shit I had in my house, because they’re coming to my house because I’m probably going to be the No. 1 suspect for this.’

But little did I know that the Norwegian police already knew that Count Grishnackh [Varg] was going down also to kill him. Because they bugged his phone, and he actually talked about this killing before he went to Bergen so the cops already knew that he was coming, so they probably were thinking to themselves, ‘We didn’t nail this guy for the church burnings, so let’s nail him for murder, and get rid of this f–king guy in Oslo the same time.’ So that’s basically what happened.”

In a separate interview with Loudwire, he also explained that his wanting to kill Euronymous came down to the disrespect he had for Per "Dead" Olin's suicide, after photos had been taken of his dead body and infamously used for their live bootleg album Dawn of the Black Hearts:

“A tragic thing happened to my band — one of my best friends [Dead] killed himself. As I’m trying to cope with this, Euronymous tells me that he has taken photos of his dead body. I got very upset by this and I told him, ‘I’m going to beat you up, I’m going to kill you. Burn the photos before you even talk to me again. “[Euronymous] didn’t give me any room to grieve. I was very mad at him, so when he was killed — he was my best friend for 10 years — I never cried over his death."

The gruesome story was recently retold by the controversial film Lords of Chaos, which divided black metal fans and drew some criticism for its failure to remain truly accurate.

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