A member of the far-left extremist scene in Sweden faces charges of illegal weapons possession after police found semi-automatic rifles along with police uniforms in a rented storage unit last summer.
The 32-year-old, who originally comes from Gislaved, faces prosecution on serious weapons offence charges according to prosecutors who noted a large number of semi-automatic rifle parts that were recovered from the storage unit last year Sveriges Radio reports.
Prosecutor Petra Schöniger heads the investigation and commented on the charges saying, “The investigation shows that the operational weapon of the AR-15 type has been assembled and completed inside the container and that it has subsequently been fired. Other parts of the same rifle type found could have been assembled into four fully operational weapons.”
The weapons find occurred last summer with police initially believing that it had been linked to organised gangs, finding police uniforms and other disguises along with the weapons. Soon after the discovery of the storage unit, arrests were made of a teacher and another man was sought at the time, both linked to radical far-left extremism.
Since the initial find, other caches of weapons were also discovered between Jönköping and Huskvarna including a cache found by orienteers in October that contained weapons parts and cartridges that matched the type of rifles found in the storage unit.
So far the prosecution has not put forth a theory as to what the intended use of the firearms was but Prosecutor Schöniger noted that the investigation had shown concrete links between the man and the far-left scene saying, “the crime should be judged as extremely serious.”
The threat of far-left extremism has risen in several European countries in recent years, most notably in Germany where the domestic intelligence agency BfV revealed last year that between 2012 and 2017, violent crimes tied to left-wing extremists had risen by 88 percent.
Earlier this year, the Italian intelligence service issued a similar warning, claiming that Antifa radicals were becoming more and more violent.
“Information findings have shown a growing tendency towards radicalisation, especially through the dissemination of documentation and detailed data on the objectives to hit, combined with attempts to favour tactical convergence between the different visions of anarchist action,” the security services said in their annual domestic and external threat report.
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