HELSINKI (AP) – Finland’s domestic security agency on Tuesday maintained its terror threat assessment at an “elevated” level two on a four-point scale, while noting that the danger of extreme right-wing terrorism has grown in the Nordic country.
The Finnish Security and Intelligence Service, known by the abbreviation Supo, said in its 2020 review that it had identified far-right operators “with the capacity and motivation to mount a terrorist attack” in the country of 5.5 million.
“The far-right counter-terrorism targets identified by Supo are typically linked to the extreme right-wing international online environment,” Supo Director Antti Pelttari said in a statement.
The agency said that “some indications of concrete preparation have also emerged” of such far-right terrorism threats in Finland, but it stopped short of providing further details.
The threat level has remained unchanged from the previous year.
Supo noted that, overall, the biggest threat of a terrorist attack in Finland is currently posed by individuals or small groups supporting either far-right or Islamic fundamentalist ideology.
The agency currently monitors the activities of some 390 individuals in Finland. The majority of these persons have links to radical Islam ideology, and Supo didn’t provide the number of far-right “targets” on its list.
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