Police were forced to break up a baying mob of jobseekers outside an employment office in Sweden after it accidentally invited 61,000 people to a recruitment meeting.

The e-mail call for the meeting should have gone out to about 1,000 jobseekers but instead went to all unemployed people registered in Stockholm, police said.

Hundreds of people expecting to attend crowded into the alley where the labour office is located and spilled into the adjacent street, a main thoroughfare running through downtown Stockholm.

Emotions were running high and office staff sounded the alarm, bringing police to the scene.

Clas Olsson, acting director of the employment office, told the Aftonbladet newspaper he did not know if the cause was a human or technical error.

Sweden’s total unemployment stood at 8.6 per cent in January.

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