STOCKHOLM: A 19-year-old man in Sweden has been charged with planning a knife attack on a high school in the name of the Daesh militant group, prosecutors said Friday.
The young man planned to wound or kill people at a high school in the southern Swedish town of Halmstad between March 1 and April 13, the prosecution service said in a statement.
He has been charged with “belonging to a terrorist organization” and “public incitement to terrorism.”
The man was arrested in April, the statement added. It did not identify him.
Deputy chief prosecutor Henrik Olin said in the statement that he could prove “the perpetrator had a direct terrorist intent.”
AFP was not able to immediately verify whether the accused was a student at the school, nor his nationality.
The trial is scheduled to begin on November 19 and last four days.
The Swedish Security Service (Sapo), which conducted the preliminary investigation, said the accused had “consumed and disseminated violent Islamist propaganda online.”
He “stated that he was willing to swear allegiance to Daesh, and urged others to spread the terrorist organization’s message,” Sapo said in a statement.
The group calling itself Daesh mounted numerous attacks across Europe from 2014 but US-led forces virtually wiped it out in its strongholds in Iraq in 2017 and Syria in 2019.
Sapo’s head of operations Fredrik Hallstrom said traditional terrorist organizations’ ability to direct attacks against countries in Europe had decreased.
“The primary threat of attacks now comes from individuals who act on their own against easily accessible targets using simple means, such as bladed weapons,” he said.
Hallstrom said in the statement that youths and children “consume large amounts of propaganda and graphic violent material on social media and other digital platforms.”
He said the case was a “telling example of what the terrorist threat to Sweden looks like, and the reality that children and young people in particular risk being drawn into.”
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