A Europe-wide police unit is to be set up next month with the aim of shutting down social media accounts used by key Islamic State (IS) militants to spread propaganda and recruit foreigners to their cause, Europol said yesterday.

The small police team will scour the internet and try to take down accounts of IS ringleaders within hours of being detected, in a bid to dent a propaganda machine which is reckoned to send out about 100,000 tweets a day.

“One of the major issues for us is the number, the scale of this – we’re talking about tens of thousands of user accounts that are operating in this space,” said Rob Wainwright, Director of Europol, the Hague-based police agency which will coordinate the unit.

“What we are observing online, we will combine with the intelligence we have from more traditional sources to try to identify out of all those user accounts who are the key drivers... so we can take a more strategic impact to take down those that really matter,” he said by telephone.

Up to 5,000 people from Western Europe are thought to have travelled to Syria and Iraq, many to join Islamic State, causing widespread concern among European states that their citizens could return radicalised and ready to carry out attacks at home.

Europol has no powers of its own to remove offending accounts and the new police unit, initially made up of about 10-20 officers from across Europe, will work with unnamed social media companies to target prominent IS figures.