The Swedish authorities are unable to stem a gang war which has lasted for two long years and which has intensified in recent days. The country has the highest firearm homicide rate in Europe.
The figures date from 2022, a dark year, when the Swedes only spent around thirty days without a shooting breaking out in the country. Everything indicates that Sweden is on the same basis for the year 2023. Intelligence claims that the situation has not been so dangerous since the post-war period in 1945. Violence confined to large cities, Stockholm, Malmö, Gothenburg , but which is now spreading in all urban centers. The police even note that a new series of score-settling is underway: seven people murdered in three weeks. On September 11, the victim was a 13-year-old boy.
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According to the police, this young teenager was one of 30,000 people involved in organized crime and drug trafficking in Sweden. He was shot dead in the southern suburbs of Stockholm. He is one of the many victims of an internal war in the Foxtrot gang, that of the “Kurdish Fox”, a faction leader now operating from Turkey. Of Iraqi origin, Rawa Majid, in conflict with one of his former accomplices, recently had his mother, a 70-year-old woman, murdered. It is this crime that is giving rise today to this escalation of violence across the country.
Only 25% of crimes committed are solved
Many debates are opening in Sweden on the circulation of weapons, 100% of those used by these gangs are illegal. Today there is a large supply of weapons, coming from the Balkans, manufactured using 3D printing and therefore impossible to trace. The other concern is the growing influence of gangs on public authorities, which explains why only 25% of crimes committed are solved.
But the big concern, according to Ardavan Khoshnood, professor of criminology at Lund University, is the age of those in possession of the weapons, increasingly minors. “For every death in Sweden, you have between three and four young individuals in the queue to take over. The priority is to stop the gang recruitment network. Most of the new recruits are children, so we need to put in place better collaboration between schools, police and social services if we want to reverse this deadly curve.”said the Swedish criminologist. 85% of delinquents involved in these clashes between gangs come from immigrants and neighborhoods.