He is convicted of participating in a terrorist organization and violating the country's weapons and explosives laws. The sentence is eight years in prison, six of which are suspended, writes the Dutch newspaper Het Parool .
The time in prison will therefore be at least two years. He has previously served nine months in custody.
The Swede must also complete a deradicalization program. He has five years to complete the program and is required to report his progress to the authorities every six months.
The verdict was handed down in a packed courtroom in Luxembourg this morning. The convicted person was not present, according to Het Parool.
The 23-year-old was born and raised in Luxembourg with Swedish parents; his father holds a leading position in the Swedish business community.
Had chemistry lab
It was in February 2020 that the police raided the family's home in a well-off residential suburb outside Luxembourg City. The house contained an entire chemistry lab where the then 18-year-old man had been making deadly explosives.
His computer contains hundreds of documents with far-right content and various terrorist plans. Among them is a Google document called “Fun time for Eurovision 2020,” which detailed plans to poison visitors to the Eurovision Song Contest in Rotterdam with cyanide or ricin and to cause panic with chlorine gas. The plans included infiltrating a security company and blocking emergency exits to maximize damage.
A young man in the Netherlands was also involved in the Eurovision plan, but he has not been charged.
The 23-year-old has also planned other attacks in several countries - including against an abortion clinic in Stockholm, against an asylum seeker in Dalarna, and against a production company that made a commercial for SAS that he did not like.
The reason it took so long between arrest and conviction was that investigators had “an unusually large amount of data” to analyze, according to a spokesperson for Luxembourg’s Ministry of Justice.
Studying chemistry
Today, the 23-year-old lives in Sweden, studies chemistry at a university and runs a company “within the chemical and biotechnological industry.” During the trial, he confessed to the terrorist plans and admitted that he probably would have killed people if the police had not stopped him. But he explained that he had now put Nazism behind him and said he was remorseful.
However, the prosecutor claimed that his online activity indicates that as recently as a couple of years ago he was still active in right-wing extremist circles.
The convicted Swede has had connections with The Base and The Green Brigade – two now defunct American terrorist organizations within the so-called eco-fascism.
When he and an accomplice burned down a mink farm in Blekinge in 2019, it was linked to those groups.
Within ecofascism, right-wing extremism intersects with a passion for nature and the environment and a fear of overpopulation. But the romanticism of nature has little to do with the climate movement, but can rather be traced back to traditionally Nazi ideas about racial biology and blood and soil.
The movement is inspired by the American Nazi James Mason and his book "Siege", which calls for acts of violence by lone wolves and small terrorist cells with the aim of triggering a race war.
The terrorist Brenton Tarrant, who shot and killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in the spring of 2019, called himself an ecofascist.
Patrick Crusius, who on August 3, 2019, murdered 22 people in a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, also said he was inspired by Tarrant and wrote about environmental destruction in his manifesto.
Source: Expo, Vice, Center Against Violent Extremism
