Interior minister Anders Ygeman tells Swedish media of plan to use charter flights to repatriate thousands amid toughening of immigration rules.

Sweden is preparing to expel up to 80,000 asylum seekers who arrived in 2015 and whose applications have been rejected, the country’s interior minister, Anders Ygeman, has said.

“We are talking about 60,000 people but the number could climb to 80,000,” the minister was quoted as saying by Swedish media, adding that the government had asked the police and authorities in charge of migrants to organise their expulsion.

He said that since about 45% of asylum applications are currently rejected, the country must get ready to send back tens of thousands of the 163,000 who sought shelter in Sweden last year.

“We have a big challenge ahead of us. We will need to use more resources for this and we must have better cooperation between authorities,” Ygeman told newspaper Dagens Industri.