STOCKHOLM - A restaurant blown to bits and a grenade tossed into an apartment building: Stockholm, long plagued by gang violence, has seen a surge of bombings and shootings since the start of the year.
Four shootings and three bombings occurred in the Swedish capital this week, police said on Friday, with a total of 21 such incidents and two deaths since Dec 25.
The police have deployed a special crisis group to try to end the violence, Stockholm’s interim police chief Mattias Andersson told a press conference.
The violence is attributed to the settling of scores between rival gang members, many of them young teens, over the drug market or personal vendettas, according to the police.
“What we have today is not one conflict, but several conflicts that are going on at the same time,” Mr Andersson said.
“These are unscrupulous attacks that affect not only those who are the targets but also residents in those areas, and that is totally unacceptable.
“Our main priority in the Stockholm region is to break this cycle of violence. There is nothing more important than that right now.”
The authorities have struggled for years to contain escalating violence across Sweden, with gangs recruiting ever younger teens to carry out their activities since they risk shorter sentences if caught.
Ms Hanna Paradis, commanding officer of the Stockholm police, said half of the suspects in gang crimes were now under the age of 18, and 75 per cent were under the age of 20.
In what she termed a worrying development, Ms Paradis said “many of them are being forced to commit crimes and are threatened with their lives if they don’t”.
Mr Andersson added that 300 gang-related weapons were seized last year, including 42 automatic weapons as well as several tonnes of narcotics and “a whole lot” of explosives.
Sweden registered a total of 388 shootings in 2022, 61 of them fatal, up from 45 the previous year.
One of the richest and most egalitarian countries in the world, the Scandinavian nation nonetheless tops European rankings for fatal shootings.
According to a 2021 report by Sweden’s National Council for Crime Prevention, among 22 countries with comparable data, only Croatia had more deadly shootings, and no other country posted a bigger increase than Sweden in the past decade. AFP
