Already 150 addresses in Stockholm are on the police list: 150 addresses where the next crime can take place. People from the criminal environment live at these addresses, but also family members, friends and companies that are associated with criminal gangs.
But innocent people and extremely young children are also increasingly becoming victims of gang violence. For example, 13-year-old Milo from Stockholm was reported missing on Friday, September 8. He was found dead on Monday morning, September 11. He had been shot in the head. His death is believed to be related to a gang conflict. Last week we made this video about him:
‘Three more deaths in 12 hours’
Three more deaths were reported in the space of 12 hours this week. On Wednesday evening, fire opened in a Stockholm suburb, killing one man. Another was injured. Shortly before that a rapper of 18 shot dead on a football field in southern Stockholm. A video of the murder appeared on Instagram.
Lawyer Evin Cetin late SVT know that social media giants such as Instagram must put an end to the distribution of such images.
The next morning, a residential area outside Uppsala, 80 kilometers north of the Swedish capital, was rocked by a bomb explosion. A 25-year-old woman was killed and five homes were damaged. She herself would not have been the target of the bomb, she was an innocent neighbor of a gang member.
“You increasingly see that people who have nothing to do with it are also suffering from the escalating gang violence,” says Sweden expert Petra Broomans of the University of Groningen.
Gangs deliberately target the family of rival gang members. For example, this month a woman in her sixties was shot dead in Uppsala. The woman is the mother of one of the leaders of the Foxtrot criminal network.
‘Kurdish fox’
The country has been rocked by a deadly wave of shootings and explosions in recent months, with many suspected to be linked to a split within the major Foxtrot criminal gang. The leader of the Foxtrot gang is 36-year-old Rawa Majid, also known as the ‘Kurdish Fox’. He is at odds with his former right-hand man, 33-year-old Ismail Abdo. It is not clear exactly what the dispute is about, but drugs and weapons play a crucial role in the gang violence.
“Majid is compared to drug lord Pablo Escobar,” says Broomans. “He sends his soldiers from Turkey. And the boys who are recruited to carry out those murders are getting younger and younger, because they are not being tried under adult criminal law, but under juvenile criminal law, which imposes lower sentences. It is a horrible situation .”
Yesterday, Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson indicated that he would use the army to tackle gang violence. “We will track down the gangs and defeat them,” Kristersson promised.
“But there are no quick solutions to this problem,” says political scientist Patrik Öhberg at the University of Gothenburg. “The Swedish government has its hands full with this situation, which has gotten completely out of hand. Last year gang violence was the main topic during the elections, during the 2014 elections this was not even an issue.”
In 2022, Sweden recorded 391 shootings, of which 62 were fatal and 100 people were injured. An overview of all reported shootings between 1998 and 2022:
‘Not a role model’
Political scientist Öhberg admits that gang violence is a sensitive subject in Sweden. “It’s affiliated with us failed integration process, creating parallel societies. In 50 years, Sweden has become a multicultural society, within which many suburbs have emerged. Sweden is certainly not a role model on this theme, despite the fact that other European countries may look at us this way.”
Due to the bloody crime wave, Swedish media have renamed this month ‘black september’. Four of the twelve victims who died this month are certain to have had no connection with the gangs.
“We have never seen anything like this in Sweden. No other country in Europe has seen anything like this,” Swedish Prime Minister Kristersson said in a televised speech last night. Today he meets with the police chief and the commander-in-chief of the army ‘to see how the army can help the police fight the gangs’. Military personnel may take over police duties so that officers can work on other investigative tasks, reports say the BBC.
Not everyone is happy with the plan. Critics believe that Kristersson focuses too much on the symptoms and not on the causes of the violence. Politicians such as Richard Jomshof also want the age of adult criminal law to be lowered from 18 to 13, so that young criminals are also arrested and possible murders such as Milo can be prevented.
‘Thousands of Swedes involved in gang crime’
The government formed last year pledged to end the violence to nip in the bud, but since then it has actually only gotten worse, says Sweden expert Broomans. “They still have a long way to go. Neighboring country Norway is also watching the developments in Sweden with suspicion, they are afraid that the violence will spread. Young people in Sweden have become accustomed to the violence they see on social media. That is a spiral where Sweden has to find its way out. But it is certainly not solved that way.”
2023-09-29 16:27:18
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