PanARMENIAN.Net – The number of violent Islamist extremists in Sweden has soared from 200 in 2010 to “thousands”, intelligence agency Sapo said Friday, June 16 while noting that only a handful were deemed able to carry out a terror attack, AFP said.

“We would say that (the number) has gone from hundreds to thousands now,” Sapo chief Anders Thornberg told news agency TT in an interview, describing the situation as “serious”.

“This is the ‘new normal’ … It is a historic challenge that extremist circles are growing,” he said.

He stressed, however, that only a few of the “thousands” had both the intention and ability to carry out a terror attack.

A 2010 Sapo report estimated the number of violent Islamist extremists in the Scandinavian country at 200.

Thornberg attributed the rise primarily to the propaganda machine of the so-called Islamic State (IS), which has united different groups of Islamist extremists.

“We used to have different circles. We had radicalised (people) from North Africa, the Middle East and Somalia, but they were all separate,” he said.

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