The Norwegian Police Security Service – won’t give numbers for Islamsist extremists

PST right-wing extremist terrorism spy indicted RussianNorwegian Police Security Service (PST) headquarters. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Norwegian Police Security Service (PST won’t answer how many extreme Islamists they believe exist in Norway, although such questions are answered in Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom.

 

‘The individuals we watch have varying degrees of capacity and intention, and thus, we have different concerns about them.

Our assessment is that this type of quantification of extreme Islamists won’t necessarily give the public a true picture of threat levels, or of what challenges we face,’ said Martin Bernsen, senior adviser at the Police Security Service (PST) to Dagens Næringsliv (DN) newspaper.

However, PST don’t rule out that such information might be submitted later.

“What we publish by way of numbers and other information about our work, is assessed on an ongoing basis. For the time being, we haven’t seen it as expedient to go public with a total number of extreme Islamists in Norway,’ said Bernsen.

DN pointed out that two weeks ago, the Swedish security police, Säpo, said that there are ‘thousands of violent Islamists in Sweden’.

The newspaper also wrote that some days earlier, the Finnish security police stated that they had 350 names are on a list of people who may be constituted a ‘terrorist’.

At the end of May, the British newspaper, The Times, published numbers from the intelligence service MI5, estimating that there are 23,000 jihadists in the UK, of which 3,000 are considered to be a threat.

 

 

© NTB Scanpix / Norway Today