To point out me just how bad gang crime has become in Sweden, all journalist Diamant Salihu has to do is ahead a number of cell phone messages. At first look, they appear to be spam, written in garish fonts and promising massive sums of cash, there to be earned. It’s solely on nearer examination that the aim of the pistol and cranium emojis turns into clear. These are so-called “homicide advertisements” – posted on-line by gang leaders, providing bounties to anybody keen to hold out the hits.
“All kinds of jobs can be found,” reads one, promising as much as a million krona (£78,000). “Age doesn’t matter”, provides one other – explaining why a lot of Sweden’s new contract killers aren’t hardened hitmen, however kids. A part of the issue, some say, is that Swedish regulation dictates anybody aged underneath 15 is just too younger to be prosecuted.
“We now have so many youngster troopers that no one can rely anymore,” sighs Salihu, an investigative reporter for SVT, Sweden’s reply to the BBC. “There are children as younger as 13 being arrested.”
Barely every week passes in Sweden right this moment with out a young person being arrested for such successful, preserving Salihu extraordinarily busy, and the general public within the grip of a nationwide disaster like no different earlier than it. A softly-spoken former tabloid journalist, the 41-year-old might be a personality from a Scandi-noir novel, shining gentle in society’s darker corners. The physique rely on his beat, although, is way larger than any Stieg Larsson novel, and holds out little prospect of a passable ending. For the story he has pursued for the final decade is, in impact, one large, unsolved homicide thriller: why has Sweden, lengthy the envy of the remainder of Europe for its peace and prosperity, out of the blue seeing so many gangland killings? Why, in a land that prides itself on welcoming migrants, are so many gang members from migrant communities? And is it Swedish society that’s the final wrongdoer, or the migrant communities themselves?
A social media publish promoting a contract killing for a million Swedish Krone (£78k)
They’re questions he has already addressed in two best-selling books of reportage, each kicking a hornet’s nest that liberal Sweden lengthy most well-liked to depart effectively alone. His first, Till Everybody Dies, chronicled a warfare between two Somali road gangs that left 9 younger footsoldiers useless. His newest, When No one’s Listening, charts the higher echelons of Swedish crime, as revealed via the police cracking of Encrochat, the encrypted cell phone service utilized by gangsters Europe-wide. It’s printed in translation this month in Britain – a spot the place Salihu, himself a migrant of Kosovan inventory, first noticed cracks within the multi-cultural mannequin whereas working as a overseas correspondent for the Swedish tabloid Expressen.
In the course of the six months he spent reporting for the newspaper in London, he lined the aftermath of the 2011 riots, through which gangs performed a big function. Two years later, he discovered himself reporting the identical story at residence, when riots in broke out in inner-city neighbourhoods throughout Sweden. Interviewing native youths, Salihu heard the usual complaints about joblessness and alienation, however couldn’t assist asking himself one awkward query.
“Within the Swedish areas which have social issues, I didn’t see the identical dangerous customary of housing and sophistication variations that I noticed within the UK,” he tells me by Zoom from Sweden. “So why, after we in Sweden have a usually higher lifestyle, do we’ve this escalation of violence?”
It’s a query that the remainder of Sweden’s 10 million residents are actually asking too, within the wake of a decade-long surge of violence that peaked at 62 lethal shootings in 2022. That was twice the determine for England and Wales, which have six instances the inhabitants, and ranked Sweden second solely to Albania that 12 months for gun deaths per capita in Europe.
Ageing biker clans that have been as soon as Sweden’s best-known road gangs have been supplanted by ethnic mafias from the Balkans and Center East – most notably the Kurdish-led Foxtrot group, which looms massive in Salihu’s new ebook. Foxtrot is distinguished in Sweden’s drug commerce, though a lot of its exercise would possibly extra aptly be termed “disorganised crime”. It pioneered the web bounty system, lending out weapons and grenades to any teenager in search of to make a reputation. With police struggling to maintain up, even small provincial cities have witnessed shootings and bombings.
Gang kingpins, in the meantime, are eulogised by rappers and so-called “gangfluencers”, a time period that made the Swedish Language Council’s checklist of recent phrases again in 2021. As Ulf Kristersson, the nation’s centre-Proper prime minister, laments: “Sweden has by no means seen something prefer it earlier than.”
Nor, Salihu provides, is it simply children from migrant “ghettoes” claiming the bounties. “We also now see Swedish kids involved – some from damaged backgrounds, however some whose dad and mom are profitable. All they’ve possibly performed earlier than is steal one thing or play truant, now they’re getting concerned in homicide.”
A video obtained by The Telegraph late final 12 months confirmed what seemed to be a 14-year-old murderer finishing up a contract killing for a narcotics gang. The footage exhibits the teenager, armed with a Kalashnikov rifle, firing a twig of bullets in direction of the entrance door of a property inside an condo block. It was stated to have been filmed to show the killing was carried out.
So what has gone improper? A part of the blame, Salihu says, is all the way down to the social blights frequent to most of Europe’s extra impoverished multi-racial neighbourhoods. Joblessness and discrimination restrict many children’ sense of prospects. TV gang dramas, in the meantime, usually “spotlight the flashy elements of gang life – cash, respect, energy – however omit the trauma, manipulation, and tragic penalties.”
But the sense of failure is all of the extra acute in Sweden, lengthy an open door in comparison with different European nations. Ever because the Sixties, when it first styled itself as a humanitarian superpower, it has taken in these fleeing bother overseas, be it People fleeing the Vietnam warfare draft, Soviet dissidents, or Iraqis fleeing Saddam Hussein’s regime. Within the Nineteen Nineties got here refugees from the Balkans, and within the final decade asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa have arrived. Anxious to not create “parallel societies”, Swedish governments have lengthy funded social integration programmes alongside the waves of migration.
As regards to the lethal rise of gang crime, Ulf Kristersson, the nation’s centre-Proper prime minister has stated that ‘Sweden has by no means seen something prefer it earlier than’ – Getty
However parallel societies have sprung up regardless, in accordance with Salihu, who lived till the age of eight on his household’s farm in Kosovo, the place even vehicles have been a luxurious.
“We had a horse and cart, like within the Borat motion pictures,” he says. The household fled forward of the warfare with Serbia in 1998, which noticed their residence burned down, settling in a provincial city in central Sweden.
“I keep in mind my mom breaking down in tears when she realized that her brother had been killed whereas preventing within the warfare,” Salihu recollects. “I’ve all the time felt that if I’d stayed in Kosovo, I won’t be alive right this moment.”
Even again then, about 20 per cent of his new Swedish classmates have been migrants like him. However he additionally blended with youngsters whose dad and mom had faculty educations and second properties – a imaginative and prescient of the Swedish dream to aspire to. Right this moment, he says, his outdated neighbourhood now not even glimpses that dream.
“I went again there in 2014 as a journalist, and mainly each child within the college was now from a migrant background,” he says. “That makes it more durable for them to study Swedish correctly, they usually gained’t see what I noticed as a toddler. Society has grow to be far more segregated. Swedes welcome folks from each nook of the world, however don’t truly wish to stay with them as neighbours.”
Salihu doesn’t blame all of it on racism, nonetheless. In his new ebook, for instance, he writes of gang-plagued areas the place single moms are sometimes elevating eight kids alone. Many gang members he interviews, in the meantime, don’t blame society or their dad and mom, however “actively select their way of life”.
“They’ve had all of the alternatives, with siblings who’ve graduated and received good jobs, but nonetheless they’ve chosen the dangerous path.”
The “dangerous path”, sadly, is open to anybody who chooses to reply a homicide advert. Recruits are typically directed to their targets through stay smart-phone feeds, after which ordered to movie their handiwork. Final December, a killer utilizing Go Professional footage filmed himself gunning down a Syrian-born rapper, Ninos Khouri, in a multi-storey car-park.
Gang leaders additionally domesticate cult presences on social media, their followers usually taking exception to less-than-flattering protection by journalists like Salihu. When one former Foxtrot affiliate, Mustapha al-Jubouri, broadcast a video revealing he had faked his personal loss of life – waving a golden Kalashnikov round to show he was nonetheless alive – his acolytes singled out Salihu for criticism on a stay Instagram feed. “It was being watched by 20,000 folks,” says Salihu, who retains his residence handle secret. “How may Instagram not do one thing about that, understanding what sort of persons are concerned, inciting homicide and threatening journalists?”
Sweden’s gang menace can also be spreading abroad, together with to Britain. In 2022, Anis Hemissi, a kickboxer of Tunisian descent, was jailed within the UK for murdering Flamur Beqiri, a Swedish-Albanian drug kingpin gunned down outdoors his residence in Battersea. Swedish police are additionally searching a 25-year-old gangster suspected of murdering two British journey brokers, Juan Cifuentes and Farooq Abdulrazak, shot useless throughout a enterprise journey to town of Malmö final July. Their households insist that they had no gang connections.
To complicate issues, many gangsters even have bolt-holes within the Center East, the place household connections typically protect them from arrest. Al-Jubouri issued his “comeback” video from Iraq, whereas Foxtrot’s chief, Rawa “The Fox” Majid, fled to Turkey six years in the past, taking citizenship to keep away from extradition. He reportedly owned a luxurious flat in Istanbul, from the place he continued to wage gang feuds remotely earlier than then apparently fleeing to Iran.
With the far-Proper, anti-immigrant Swedish Democrats now attracting one in 5 of Swedish voters, the federal government has been attempting to push again on the gang drawback. Jail phrases have been elevated considerably for juveniles, who used to get away with as little as three years’ custody for homicide. Due to the cracking of Encrochat – which let police forces throughout Europe snoop on gangsters’ plans – round 400 Swedish criminals have been jailed. Swedish politicians are additionally calling for curbs on social media use to cease the “homicide advertisements” – one thing Salihu warns may additionally unfold to the UK. “You too could find yourself with British youngster troopers, simply as we face this disaster in Sweden,” he says. He factors out that whereas Britain’s harder firearms legal guidelines imply shootings are much less frequent, knife crime is sort of as dangerous: within the 12 months to March 2024, 57 under-25s died in stabbings, 17 of them underneath 16.
However whereas Sweden’s gun killings have now dipped – final 12 months noticed 45 – Salihu fears the underlying trigger for the violence continues to lurk. He additionally factors out that the gang footsoldiers are actually attracting much more harmful paymasters than frequent criminals. A 12 months in the past, Swedish officers accused Iran of recruiting native gang members for assaults on Israeli pursuits in Europe, including Israel’s Stockholm Embassy, where a live grenade was found in the grounds.
Final month, Washington sanctioned the Foxtrot community over the assaults, saying The Fox had “particularly cooperated” with Tehran. With that in thoughts, Salihu fears it might someday not simply be gangsters who stay in concern of being focused by “homicide advertisements”.
“If we enable these criminals to grow to be extra highly effective, I concern that our democratic establishments will come underneath strain, be it prosecutors, or journalists – I actually would really feel far more afraid,” Salihu provides. “These guys are predators. It’s important to stand as much as them, not again off.”
When Nobody’s Listening: Inside Sweden’s Drug Gangs, is printed by Polity Press, and obtainable for buy (£25.00) from April 18
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