Swedish police arrest 14 for planning asylum centre attack

Stockholm: Swedish police said on Tuesday they had arrested 14 men for allegedly planning to attack an asylum centre after finding axes, knives and iron pipes in their cars.

Authorities said they detained the men on Monday after being tipped off about a planned attack against a migrant centre in Nynashamn, some 60 kilometres (37 miles) south of Stockholm.

The suspects were all carrying foreign ID papers, the daily Aftonbladet quoted police as saying, adding some of them were Polish nationals living and working in Sweden.

"We believe that the migrant centre was the target of the attack," police spokesman Hesam Akbari said. He would not however be drawn on the suspects' nationalities.

Last month, dozens of masked men believed to belong to hooligan or neo-Nazi gangs gathered in central Stockholm and distributed leaflets calling for attacks on young migrants.

Sweden, a country of 9.8 million, took in about 163,000 asylum seekers in 2015, putting it among the European Union states with the highest proportion of refugees per capita.

More than one million people travelled to Europe last year the majority of them refugees fleeing conflict in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan triggering the continent's worst migration crisis since World War II.

With the influx showing little sign of abating, many countries, including Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, France, have tightened their asylum rules in a bid to discourage new arrivals.

In Sweden, the tougher rules come against the backdrop of rising concern over conditions in the country's overcrowded asylum facilities.

Swedish officials have called for stepped-up security after an employee at a centre for unaccompanied child refugees was fatally stabbed in January. Sweden expects to receive up to 140,000 additional asylum seekers this year.