A 44-year-old man who plotted to carry out terrorist attacks on Muslims has been jailed for three years by a court in Zutphen.

The court was told Vincent T had set up a Facebook group with the aim of ‘combating Muslims’ and had tried to recruit members and get hold of weapons online. He also planned to ‘blast off leftwing leaders’, naming television presenter turned politician Sylvana Simons as a potential target.

The AIVD security service said it believed that T planned to put his words into action. He had also searched under terms such as ‘killer for hire’ and information about making bombs on the internet, the AIVD said.

‘His active hunt for weapons and being in possession of nearly 2,000 bullets means T had past the phase of being a ‘keyboard terrorist’, the court said in its ruling.

T is being held in the maximum security prison in Vught.

The Dutch counter terrorism unit NCTV said last month there has been a rise in right wing extremism in Western Europe as a whole but the situation in the Netherlands is not yet as serious as in the early 1990s.

In the Netherlands, far right violence is usually unorganised and involves small groups who don’t feel the need to be part of a known organisation, the NCTV says. According to official figures, there were 45 cases of far-right violence in the Netherlands in 2016, the most recent figures in the report.