One of the biggest threats to Swedish security is lone perpetrators, something Sweden has experience with. Rakhmat Akilov, who drove the truck on Drottninggatan in 2017, seems to have essentially radicalized himself.
The same applies to several of the school attacks that took place in Sweden. The perpetrators have acted on their own, often through inspiration from various online forums.
But finding the lone perpetrators is more difficult than finding groups. According to the Security Police, they are a challenge because they are on the edge of extremist environments.
– There are people who are more or less self-radicalized, often online and where elements of mental illness can occur, writes Säpo’s press secretary Fredrik Hultgren-Friberg in an email.
At the same time, Säpo assesses that the number of threat actors who are online will increase significantly.
Method developed by the FBI
Säpo is very secretive about how they work to identify potential lone perpetrators of violence. But there are developed methods to analyze suspicious people. One such tool is the TRAP-18 that the FBI has developed, based on analyzes of 111 lone perpetrators of violence.
The method from 2017 is about looking for a total of 18 warning signs. They are in turn divided into two categories – eight warning behaviors and ten character traits.
In the study conducted by the FBI, 77 percent of the lone perpetrators exhibited at least half of the warning signs.
Tony Ingesson, researcher in intelligence analysis at Lund University, teaches about the method. He explains that it is not enough that only a few warning signs are shown, but that there needs to be several working together.
At the same time, there is a clear recommendation that authorities should act if four of the warning behaviors are displayed.