According to Poland’s interior ministry on Thursday, three 19-year-old males have been charged with obtaining pyrotechnic materials and organizing terrorist acts, including an attack on a school that was motivated by mass murderers like Norwegian Anders Breivik.
In 2011, the anti-Muslim neo-Nazi Breivik committed Norway’s greatest peacetime crime, killing 77 people. He shot down 69 people, the most of them were youths, at a Labour Party youth camp on Utoeya Island after first killing eight with a car bomb in Oslo.
The three men will be charged in Poland as Austria laments the deaths of ten people at a 21-year-old shooter’s former high school in Graz, Austria, in one of the worst shooting sprees in the nation’s recent history. The shooter, whose motivation is yet unknown, also took his own life.
What makes Poland unique in Europe’s terror history?
In modern history, Poland is unique in Europe because it has no record of a successful terrorist attack. However, it has had threats and disrupted planned attacks mostly from violent far-right extremists and lone-actor extremists inspired by infamous mass murderers. In the past 30 years, Poland has not had a successful terrorist attack like many other European nations, which is partly due to restrictive gun laws, and partly due to its security services which have foiled numerous plots.
Poland has improved its legislative and institutional framework to tackle terrorism and other related threats, including increased preventative measures against money laundering and terrorist financing. Recent strides in compliance with Financial Action Task Force (FATF) standards signal Poland’s iterative commitment to cutting off the funding of terrorists by providing better financial supervision and intelligence capabilities.
The Military Police, Financial Supervision Authority and Financial Intelligence Unit now have additional resources to further enhance detection and prevention of terrorist financing and terrorism-related crimes.
Poland, as a NATO member, contributes to the Alliance’s counter-terrorism activities and participates in multinational exercises with counter-terrorism components like Northern Challenge which includes explosive ordnance disposal and IED threats.
Poland scopes out NATO’s Defence Against Terrorism Programme of Work (DAT POW), which develops technologies and capabilities to detect and counter asymmetric threats such as IEDs, unmanned aircraft systems (drones), and CBRN attacks.
