Poland expels Swedish neo-Nazi seeking weapons training

WARSAW: Poland on Friday expelled a Swedish neo-Nazi in the country to attend a paramilitary training course on automatic weapons similar to the type used in a deadly white supremacist’s attack on mosques in New Zealand.

"Today at 8:00 am (7:00 GMT) Anton T. was put aboard a plane to Sweden," Stanislaw Zaryn, the spokesman for Poland’s special services coordinator, told AFP without providing a surname for legal reasons.

Swedish media have identified the man as Anton Thulin, a 22-year-old man previously convicted of an attempted bomb attack against a refugee centre in Sweden. The man’s presence in Poland constituted "a serious, real and current threat to security and public order," special services said in an official statement on his expulsion.

Anton T. "is a member of the Neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement which aims to create, by way of a revolution, a national-socialist Republic of the North," said the statement. "He came to Poland to attend a paramilitary training course, during which he wanted to learn how to operate the same type of weapon that Brenton Tarrant used during the attack in Christchurch," it added.

Tarrant, an self-avowed white supremacist who is Australian, has been charged with terrorism and 51 counts of murder for gunning down worshippers at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch in March.