Swedish gangs are increasingly recruiting children to carry out contract killings, authorities have warned, while the country has been overrun by an “informal economy of gang violence” in recent months.
The Nordic nation has the worst rate of gun violence in the EU, while the number of murder cases involving children tripled from 31 charges in the first eight months of 2023 to 102 in the same period this year, according to statistics. authorities.
Recruiters are luring young people on social media platforms such as Snapchat and Telegram, with group chats titled “bombing today” and “who wants to shoot someone in Stockholm” reportedly attracting thousands of members.
Children, who are often vulnerable and from poor backgrounds, are promised quick cash and rewards of up to £13,000 are offered for a successful hit.
Once enlisted, young recruits carry out the dirty work of gang bosses, murdering relatives of rival gangsters and other targets, often without even knowing the person ordering the murder.
According to police, criminal bosses are increasingly targeting children under 15 because they are too young to be prosecuted in Sweden. A boy as young as 11 was allegedly involved in a recent case.
Children traveling across the country to commit crimes for money are becoming “the new normal,” Erik Lindblad, head of the police’s gang violence task force, warned last month.
He said online chat groups advertised jobs to “tens of thousands” of young members, inviting them to volunteer to run a hit.
A teenager armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle is shown firing bullets into the home of a well-known rapper’s ex-girlfriend as a scare tactic.
Shots pictured after attack, apparently designed to scare rapper’s ex-girlfriend
The bloody nightgown a two-year-old girl was wearing when she was shot in the stomach
Three teenagers were sentenced after a man was killed while dining at a restaurant south of Stockholm in March, and the 17-year-old believed to have fired the fatal shot received a jail sentence.
Gangs have increasingly sought out mentally disabled girls and boys to carry out murders, as they believe their target is less likely to suspect them.
They deliberately hire children, as Swedish law dictates that those under 15 cannot be prosecuted, a law that critics say needs urgent reform.
With young people’s growing involvement in violent gang crimes, prosecutors are increasingly seeking incarceration rather than “closed care” for child suspects, according to Swedish media.
Three teenagers were sentenced after a man was killed while dining at a restaurant south of Stockholm in March, and the 17-year-old believed to have fired the fatal shot received a prison sentence instead of youth detention.
The teenager, believed to have used an automatic weapon, was sentenced to eight years in prison, while a 19-year-old man was sentenced to life in prison and his 16-year-old accomplice confined in a closed regime.
According to prosecutor Niksa Lucic, the circumstances of the murder suggest that it took place in a mafia context.
In August, a 16-year-old boy was arrested after shots were fired at the door of an apartment near Stockholm.
He was charged last month with attempted murder and aggravated weapons offenses after a preliminary police investigation found he was beaten into submission by an “anonymous client.”
They say he accepted the contract for 65,000 Swedish crowns (£4,600) and had told a friend on Instagram: “I just want to kill someone, I don’t care who it is.”
Carin Götblad, Stockholm police chief of the National Operations Department, said The telegraph That suspicious children often show no remorse for their actions.
“Investigators tell me that some of them are very calm, they don’t cry, they don’t say anything or ‘they don’t make comments.’ They totally lack empathy,” he said.
‘Some people say, “They don’t understand what they’ve done.” They may not fully understand the consequences of what they have done, but if you are 14 years old and you shoot a person in the head, you will understand that that man is dead.’
Dramatic video obtained by MailOnline last year showed a teenager armed with an AK-47 spraying bullets into the home of a terrified mother and her young son in a Stockholm suburb.
The flat is the home of the ex-girlfriend of a well-known rapper and the attack is believed to have been a scare tactic.
One frightened mother, who lives on the block, told MailOnline at the time: “It was crazy.” It was not a small weapon. It was a Kalashnikov. “It is terrible that attacks like this are normalized.”
In another case that shocked Sweden, a two-year-old girl was shot in the stomach by her Winne the Pooh stuffed toy, while a 16-year-old gunman killed her father and seriously injured her mother.
The horrific attack, described by a lawyer as the most brutal case she had ever worked on, unfolded in October last year when the attacker broke into the family’s home in Stockholm’s Vastberga district.
A Swedish court heard how the teenager shot the father at point-blank range before aiming the automatic rifle at the mother, who was holding her two-year-old daughter in her arms.
“It’s so brutal you can hardly believe it,” said Swedish prosecutor Lisa dos Santos.
‘The father was shot while he was on the couch, the mother was shot in the back. She was a doctor, so she tried to save herself and the child, and they both survived. “I would say it’s the worst I’ve ever had in my career.”
The image shows the suspect, 16 years old, undated. A two-year-old girl, her father, 40, and her mother were shot in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 12, 2023.
It was later learned that the killer had broken into the wrong house because his victims had the same last name as his intended target.
The next day, the same attacker carried out another heinous contract murder of two women (a 60-year-old grandmother and a 20-year-old grandmother) who were relatives of a rival gang member.
After being captured, a Swedish court handed the teenager a record 12-year prison sentence.
Police have warned that crime bosses who use young people to spill blood in their name are often abroad and may escape justice.
Lindblad, leader of the task force, has urged social media companies to act to police their platforms and for society to take such online activities more seriously.
“If a criminal had stood in a square and shouted at 10,000 children: ‘Murder, Malmö, 250,000 crowns, who will take it?’, then I am sure that society would have reacted,” he said, adding that the police is working to be more present online.
The image shows the Winnie the Pooh stuffed animal, undated, held by the two-year-old girl when she and her mother were shot in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 12, 2023.
Last month, a Swedish teenager was arrested in Spain for allegedly running a weapons rental service that used “child soldiers” in Sweden and Denmark.
The 14-year-old allegedly “played a key role” in recruiting, paying and instructing young people how to carry out attacks via the Telegram messaging app, Spanish police said.
It is alleged that he would also organize deliveries of weapons and explosives, including assault rifles. A teenager was given an escape plan involving an electric scooter.
The usual price for a murder was said to be between €20,000 and €50,000.
The boy’s parents were also arrested and police said the family home in Alicante was used as an “operations centre”.
Deadly violence linked to disputes between criminal gangs has escalated in recent years, with hundreds of shootings and several bomb attacks.
Mikael Tenezos, ‘The Greek’ (left), and Rawa Majid, ‘The Kurdish Fox’ (right), are allegedly high-profile drug trafficking gangsters who are at war with each other in Sweden.
In recent years, mafia groups abroad have called Sweden a “haven” for their activities, while organized crime groups have infiltrated business sectors and found ways to smuggle military-grade weapons into the country.
September 2023 was an especially bloody month, with more than 40 violent episodes and 12 deaths recorded in just 20 days, earning it the nickname “Black September.”
In all of 2023, 53 people were killed in shootings in Sweden, where around 10.5 million people live.
In 2022, that number was 62, and Stockholm’s per capita homicide rate was about 30 times higher than London’s.
Gangsters carry out personal vendettas against each other or hire young men to do their dirty work.
Nearly half of the suspects in gun-related murders in 2022 were between 15 and 20 years old, young people who had been trained by gangs.
‘Kurdish Fox’, whose real name is Rawa Majid, became a household name in Sweden in 2022 when the feud between the 38-year-old Foxtrot crime network and the Dalen gang, led by Mikael ‘The Greek’ Tenezos, 25 years old, spread fear. in several cities as they fought for parts of the country’s highly lucrative drug market.
The two alleged ringleaders have fled abroad and are now believed to run their operations through intermediaries.