The Swedish Agency for Psychological Defense has warned that Sweden is in the crosshairs of foreign actors who are spreading messages that the country is a legitimate target for terror attacks.
Mikael Tofvesson, head of the operations department at the Swedish Agency for Psychological Defense, stated earlier this week that attitudes toward Sweden abroad were becoming more and more aggressive.
According to Tofvesson, part of the rise in aggression comes from a social media campaign by Muslims that claimed Swedish social services were kidnapping the children of Muslim families in Sweden, a phenomenon that has been ongoing since late 2021, broadcaster SVT reports.
Another factor listed by Tofvesson was the multi-day violent Easter riots that took place last year in reaction to the burning of copies of the Islamic Qur’an in several cities by Danish anti-Islam activist Rasmus Paludan.
“However, we must emphasize that we do not assess the terrorist threats themselves, it is the responsibility of the security police,” Tofvesson said.
The Swedish Security Police (Sapo) commented on the terror threat levels with press spokesman Fredrik Hultgren-Friberg saying, “the Security Police is, of course, following developments closely in the world around us. We can state that the current situation we consider problematic and can be threat-driving.”
According to SVT, however, the terror threat level in Sweden has not changed in years and remains at level three out of a five-level scale.
Sweden has only seen one major terrorist attack in recent years, in Stockholm in 2017 when failed Uzbeck asylum seeker Rakhmat Akilov drove a truck through the busy Drottninggatan shopping area, killing five people, including eleven-year-old Ebba Akerlund.
During his trial, a witness claimed that Akilov has expressed sympathies for the Islamic State terrorist group prior to the attack and had allegedly tried to join the terror group in Syria.
Last month, Sweden became the focus of the Islamic world again after the burning of a Qur’an by Rasmus Plaudan in front of the Turkish embassy, leading to condemnation from governments and calls for a boycott of Swedish goods from the al-Azhar University in Cairo, a major centre of thought in the Sunni branch of Islam.