Stockholm, Sweden:
More and more children are contacting criminal gangs in Sweden to offer their services as hitmen, the country’s police chief said on Friday, after three people were murdered within 24 hours.
The Scandinavian country has been embroiled in a bloody conflict in recent years between gangs competing for arms and drug trafficking. This has escalated due to internal fighting within a leading gang.
Apartment buildings and homes across the country are regularly rocked by explosions. Shootings, once confined to deprived areas, have become a regular occurrence in public places in the usually quiet, prosperous country.
“We have a situation where children themselves contact criminal gangs” offering to commit murders, Anders Thornberg told journalists.
“The criminals are ruthless,” Anders Thornberg said, adding that the gangs also contacted people, often minors, and “provided them with weapons and gave them the address where they could organize the attack.”
Even the victims were often young.
Twelve people were killed in shootings and explosions in September, Sweden’s deadliest month in the past four years, according to a tally by Swedish public broadcaster SVT.
Senior police officer Mats Lindstrom said he had seen many reports of young people contacting gangs for contract killings.
In August 2023, there were 69 people under the age of 18 in custody in Sweden, compared to 14 in the same month two years earlier.
On Thursday, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson promised to defeat criminal gangs with the help of the army.
“We’re going to hunt down the gangs. We are going to beat the gangs,” Ulf Kristersson said in a televised address to the nation on Thursday evening.
“An increasing number of children and completely innocent people are affected by this extreme violence,” Kristersson said.
“Sweden has never seen anything like this. No other country in Europe sees anything like this.”
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