A member of the populist Sweden Democrats claims he received a threatening letter containing a single 9mm bullet at his home.
The politician, who has not been named, found the letter when he arrived at his home on Wednesday and reported the incident to the police, who are now investigating the threat.
Jan Lorentzon, group leader for the Sweden Democrats (SD) in the municipality of Ljungby, spoke to online newspaper Nyheter Idag about the incident as the politician in question has declined to comment.
“There was a letter on the stairs when he came home after work and found there was a nine-millimetre bullet in the letter,” Lorentzon said, claiming the message’s content referenced the lawmaker’s political beliefs.
“There was something about ‘SD being racists’,” he said.
Lorentzon added that the incident was the first of its kind in the municipality.
“It is very unpleasant because it is an attack on the democracy that we have here in Sweden, which we have been protecting for quite a few years. But there are some who will then take liberties and disrupt it to get their agenda through,” he said.
Over the last several years, several Sweden Democrat politicians have not only been threatened but attacked as well.
The polling firm Demoskop published a study on municipal politicians across Sweden in 2019, which revealed that members of the party were the most likely to be subjected to threats or harassment.
The study revealed that 47 per cent of SD members claimed to have experienced threats, physical violence, or vandalism compared to 29 per cent of all parties’ politicians on average.
In one incident in 2018, a municipal politician in Stockholm saw an unidentified suspect attempt to set her home on fire late at night. She and her husband were able to extinguish the flames.
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