Poland charges three men with planning school attack inspired by Norway's Breivik

WARSAW (Reuters) -Poland has charged three 19-year-old men suspected of gathering pyrotechnic materials and planning terrorist actions, including an attack on a school inspired by mass-killers such as Norwegian Anders Breivik, the interior ministry said on Thursday.

"It appears that they were fascinated by the ideology that spreads terrorism, by these serial killers who, as in the case of Norway, killed several dozen people," ministry spokesman Jacek Dobrzynski told reporters.

"They apparently sought to do something similar here in our country," he added.

In Norway's worst peacetime atrocity, Breivik, an anti-Muslim neo-Nazi, killed 77 people in 2011. He first killed eight with a car bomb in Oslo and then gunned down 69, most of them teenagers, at a Labour Party youth camp on Utoeya island.

Dobrzynski declined to comment on local media reports that the three suspects' plan had been to attack a school in the northern Polish city of Olsztyn.

Earlier, Dobrzynski wrote on social media platform X that the suspects had been collecting information on firearms handling, shooting postures, and combat operations in open areas and indoors. They attended shooting ranges and conducted military-tactical training, an investigation in Olsztyn showed.

Unlike some other European nations, Poland has not experienced a terrorist attack in its modern history.

The decision to charge the three men in Poland comes as Austria mourns the 10 victims of a 21-year-old gunman at his former high school in the city of Graz, in one of the worst outbreaks of violence in that country's modern history. The gunman, whose motive remains unclear, also killed himself.

(Reporting by Marek Strzelecki and Pawel Florkiewicz; Editing by Stephen Coates and Gareth Jones)