‘Killing Is Simple’: Fear and Bloodshed in One of Europe’s Wealthiest Nations

“We are not Swedish. It’s obvious from how we look, and we were treated as such,” 18-year-old “Abdi” told VICE World News via an interpreter from the wing of a juvenile detention centre near Stockholm. 

Born in Sweden to Somali parents, the teenager, who spoke on condition his real name is not revealed, is locked up awaiting trial on suspicion of murder and attempted murder relating to two shootings last year. 

He said he and his family have always felt like outsiders in Sweden and he ended up turning to crime. Last summer a personal argument over what he described as “betrayal, money and respect” ended with him shooting another teenager. 

He said the gun was as easy to get hold of as water from a tap. 

“If I could rewind time it would be that my parents did not give birth to me in this country and this neighbourhood, because people like us, we are always pushed into one direction even if we don’t want to,” he said.

Abdi is one of a growing number of young people – many of them second generation immigrants from the Middle East and eastern Africa – who’ve been caught up in a spiral of tit-for-tat, gang-related gun and bomb violence in Sweden. 

Barely a day goes by in this wealthy Scandinavian country without a shooting or an explosion. In the early 2000s the number of annual gun homicides in the country was in single digits and one of the lowest in Europe. Now Sweden, with a population of just over 10 million, is a country that alongside Croatia has Europe’s highest gun homicide rate. Last year there were a record 391 shootings and 63 people shot to death, alongside 90 explosions involving hand grenades and home-made explosives. Already this year there have been 71 shootings, injuring 19 people and killing 7, as well as 38 explosions. 

With rising gang warfare involving guns and explosives on the streets of other seemingly peaceful northern European nations, and innocent bystanders being caught in the crossfire, it’s a part of Europe now facing an existential threat from the kind of gangland executions and creeping corruption many associate with Mexican cartels or the Italian mafia. But unlike Belgium and the Netherlands, whose massive cocaine smuggling ports have turned them into a magnet for violent international crime gangs, Sweden’s bullet-strewn crime wave has seemingly come out of nowhere. 

It arrived on the back of a perfect storm: a splintering criminal underworld, an army of disenfranchised youths, and a river of guns and drugs. Conditions that have sparked a swathe of slickly carried out street attacks that have genuinely shocked Europe and left many of Sweden’s older gangsters running scared. 

Initially what started pushing up the body count, most observers agree, was the fracturing of Sweden’s organised crime world.

Like in many countries in Europe, organised crime in Sweden has become democratised over the last 30 years. The globalisation of crime, social media communications and the movement of people mean everything, including black market supply routes and criminals themselves, is more connected and accessible. Importing cocaine from South America into Europe is not now restricted to a small group of old-school “Mr Bigs” as it was in the 1990s, it’s open to anyone with the right connections.

“In Sweden there used to be a handful of big actors [crime bosses] who could get in large amounts of drugs from the Netherlands and Spain,” said Manne Gerell, a criminologist at Malmo University. “Now there’s a lot more of them. Instead of having big cartels there is a lot more competition, more actors who can compete on the market to bring in narcotics.”

A plethora of young neighbourhood gangs, most named after their own districts, are now fighting for power and recognition. It is a shift that Gerell suspects is a factor in why Sweden is suffering so much violence now. 

But this rise in violence is not just about drugs and money. It’s about a plethora of petty feuds and arguments that have become more deadly – such as the high profile murder of 19-year-old Swedish rapper Einar, shot to death in Stockholm in 2021 – as a culture of violence and guns has infected the entire crime world in Sweden.

In the 1990s and 2000s the most notorious Swedish crime groups were biker gangs, such as the Hells Angels and Bandidos, the Yugo Maffia, a Serbian-Montenegrin network in Stockholm and Black Cobra, a Denmark-based clan active in Sweden with ties to the Middle East. These groups were structured, branded and fought each other for control of Sweden’s illicit markets. But they kept a lid on the body count, because as everyone knows, the police and political heat attracted by murders is bad for business. 

Yet slowly, a myriad of smaller, neighbourhood street gangs, mainly rising from the country’s heavily-segregated, suburban housing projects where immigrant families end up, began popping up across Sweden to challenge the old hegemony. Out of these crews emerged a string of notorious individuals with international links who became rich by tapping into global drug trafficking streams and muscling their way into Sweden’s increasingly decentralised crime world.

One of them is Rawa Majid, nicknamed the “Kurdish Fox”. Seen as an intelligent operator, Majid arrived in Uppsala, near Stockholm from Iran with his family as a child in the early 1990s. He’s now one of Sweden’s most notorious drug traffickers and is being pursued by police for ordering a string of murders and bomb blasts in Stockholm. The 36-year-old remains at large after moving to Turkey and gaining citizenship in 2020.  

Another is Amir Mekky, 25, a Danish citizen with Moroccan heritage who grew up in Sweden’s third biggest city, Malmo, to head street gangs. Mekky, who has ties to the notorious Dutch-Moroccan trafficker Ridouan Taghi, has been linked to a wave of brutal tit-for-tat shootings and bombings in Sweden and also Spain, where Mekky runs a crew of drug smugglers and contract killers known as Los Suecos, or “the Swedes”. Swedish police believe Mekky, arrested in Dubai in 2020 and extradited to Spain, ordered the doorstep execution in London of Swedish-Albanian record producer Flamur Beqiri, an associate of a rival Malmo gang called The Alliance. 

Sweden’s burgeoning organised crime networks have taken advantage of their excellent international connections to become big importers of drugs into the country, mainly cannabis, cocaine and speed. Intelligence gained from Encrochat busts revealed at least 84 drug trafficking gangs, who were importing ten times the amount of drugs into Sweden – 100-150 tonnes annually – than the police had previously thought. 

What’s more, Sweden’s violence is leaking out into the rest of Europe, where its gangland feuds have played out across Denmark, the UK and Spain. 

“We are exporting hitmen,” said Gerell. “Unfortunately we have a lot of young men in Sweden who have learned the trade of killing people and they are now being used abroad as well.” In 2020 five Swedes – including two aged under 18 – received heavy jail sentences after carrying out a double murder in Copenhagen in Denmark linked to an ongoing feud between the rival Death Patrol and Shottaz gangs in Rinkeby, a neighbourhood in the outskirts of Stockholm. In 2021 in the city of Marbella in southern Spain – where the Swedish husband (who since died due to ill health) and stepson of the city’s mayor have been charged with being members of an international organised crime group involved in drug trafficking and money laundering – a shootout between rival gangs from Sweden’s second biggest city, Gothenburg, left a victim badly injured.  

“There are some big players,” Kim Malmgren, a crime reporter for Expressen, a national newspaper in Sweden, told me. “However, in the grand scheme of things the Swedish criminal networks are now many in number and decentralised in power. Instead of a few big networks with a clear hierarchy you have many smaller ones. The networks are often very loosely organised to the point that most of them wouldn't recognise themselves as an organisation, but more a group of friends who grew up together. In most cases they are trying to co-exist in a relatively small geographical area in the big city regions.”

The more gangs, the more intense is the competition, not just for money but for respect and dominance. 

And this proliferation of inter gang battles has been supplied by an abundant stream of guns and explosives in Sweden. Police estimate there are 3,000 illegal firearms in Stockholm alone, around three times the number thought to be in London, a city with around ten times the population. 

According to police data, the most common firearm used in gang attacks is the Serbian-made Zastava handgun. Sven Granath, an intelligence analyst at the Swedish Police Authority, said more and more shootings are being carried out with black market Glocks, seen by Sweden’s new breed of hitmen as the BMW of the gun world. Guns are mainly imported from eastern Europe and the Balkans through Germany and Denmark. There is also a good supply of Kalashnikov (AK-47) assault rifles, hand grenades, powerful firecrackers and make-shift bombs made from thermos flasks packed with explosives. 

“In Sweden’s criminal underworld, murders are bought and sold like any everyday service,” said Malmgren.

Just how straightforward it is now to order a street murder in Sweden was revealed by thousands of messages sent between Swedish gang members via Encrochat and Sky ECC after both encrypted phone services were hacked by police. 

“It is relatively easy to find and hire people who are willing to carry out violence, whether it is an act of bombing, shooting or murder,” a 2021 police intelligence report into leaked encrypted conversations concluded. “The lack of respect for human life, the indifference to the risk of harm to third parties and the almost routine and mechanical way in which life and death decisions are made is remarkable.”

The report found there was “a low threshold for lethal violence” among criminals and that conflicts have turned into “long-lasting spirals of violence”. It said access to weapons and perpetrators is “usually good and not a limiting factor for implementation”. Some criminals plan violence at a detailed level “while others act in a way that to an outsider may seem almost casual”. 

It is more common to pay for an outsider to commit a murder than it is to organise it yourself. Criminals will offer “hitman package deals”, where the getaway car, hideout and weapons are already taken care of and the only thing left is a person willing to carry out the crime. According to encrypted chats, compensation for a murder varies between 100,000 krona (£8,000) to 1m krona (£80,000), depending on the identity of the intended victim, the experience of the shooter and any specific requests, such as a headshot. Often, teenagers were willing to undertake murder for free in order to prove themselves trustworthy and to move up the ranks. After an execution, those involved in the shooting usually shared pictures of the victim, along with mocking and derogatory comments. 

The encrypted chats showed the ruthlessness of one of those ordering a shooting. One gang member, linked to the murders of two senior members of Stockholm’s “Ostberg” gang, told his hitman via his Sky ECC phone: "If there are more than one on the scene, shoot all of them. Women, children, it doesn't matter”. 

Police evidence has revealed that gangs are increasingly employing young shooters to do their job for them. As a result prosecutors want the law changed for police to be able to wiretap suspects aged under 15. After a rash of shootings in Stockholm in December, police arrested around 30 people – of whom half were under 18 years old.

“The age of those involved in shootings has been going down for ages. This year multiple people have been arrested who are aged 14 and 15 for involvement in shootings,” said Gerell. 

In March last year, in an attack which sums up this new era of chaos in Sweden’s crime world, a 16-year-old hitman burst into a gym in central Stockholm to carry out the contract killing of a 40-year-old member of the Bandido motorcycle gang. Instead the boy killed an innocent bystander in his 50s, for which he was sentenced to two years and 11 months in closed youth care. 

In February 15-year-old Ali Shafaei, who came to Sweden from Afghanistan in 2019, was shot to death in a restaurant in Stockholm’s suburbs. Two boys, aged 15 and 17, were arrested for being involved in his murder. Days before a video of a teenager shooting up a door in a Stockholm housing estate with an AK-47 went viral.  

This culture of extreme violence has seeped down to the everyday street crime scene in cities, suburbs, housing projects and small towns across the country, spawning a new era of kids with guns, such as young men like Abdi, carrying out shootings not just on orders from above, but to settle their own teenage disputes. Experts spoken to by VICE World News estimate around half of shootings are ordered by organised crime networks, with the other half the result of isolated beefs and rivalries. 

It was maybe inevitable that once gang networks started recruiting teenagers and giving them guns to do their dirty work for them, the culture of gun violence would stick.

Amid the chaos, innocent bystanders are often caught in the crossfire. In 2020 a 12-year-old girl was outside a McDonalds in a Stockholm suburb when she was caught in the crossfire of two rival gangs and died from bullet wounds.

“Sweden has a lot of young hitmen. The way of killing is simple: a scooter, a ski mask and a gun. That’s all you need,” former criminal Nikoi Djane, who grew up around gangs in southern Sweden and is now a criminologist, told VICE World News. “These killings are efficient, rather than organised, because that makes it sound too sophisticated. I have a lot of friends who have been killed and none of them were killed due to high level gangs. They were shot for petty reasons, such as theft of small amounts of money.” 

Djane said part of the reason gun violence continues to rise in Sweden is that those involved in shootings don’t care about “heat” from police because the conviction rate is so low. In more than two thirds of shootings no-one is arrested and only a fifth of gang-related gun homicides are solved. 

“People are being taken out, and on the streets people usually know who is behind the hit. But there is not sufficient evidence for a conviction in most cases. So the end results work. Shooting people becomes normalised. Normal people who feel wronged would involve HR departments, the courts or police, but in this line of work, it’s very easy to resolve arguments using guns.” 

Granath, the police intelligence analyst, says investigations are hampered by a lack of witnesses and the fact shooters are often unknown to victims and that executions occur in public spots, where anyone can gain access. But he thinks conviction rates will improve as police focus more on DNA from weapons, CCTV and trials become less reliant on evidence from witnesses. 

So who are the shooters? Analysis carried out by Dagens Nyheter, a Swedish daily newspaper, which mapped people arrested, prosecuted or sentenced for firearm violence between 2017-2021, found the majority lived in neighbourhoods deemed “vulnerable” – in other words areas where crime gangs hold sway – and had no or very low income. Many of them were second generation immigrants from suburban housing projects where youth centres have become gang hang-outs and local politics has become infiltrated by criminal networks. 85 percent were born abroad or had at least one parent who was. The majority had roots in Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Turkey and Lebanon, as well as former Yugoslavian countries such as Kosovo, Bosnia and Serbia.

Diamant Salihu, a crime reporter for the Swedish national broadcaster SVT, told me that he had witnessed a form of “radicalisation” of young people living in some parts of the country. 

“The problems started in vulnerable areas where migrants are the dominant groups. This is not just about simple poverty, because other areas have more poverty, but in Sweden we have this unique type of segregation which is based on our housing, but which makes people outsiders.” He said for some people the only housing available to them is located away from city centres in “specific areas where many migrants end up living, the schools are poor, there is high unemployment and many do not speak Swedish”.

Last year Sweden’s then prime minister Magdalena Andersson of the centre-left Social Democrats acknowledged that housing segregation was fuelling the crime wave and pledged to curtail the shootings and combat organised crime. 

Salihu said he had seen “an ignition” of violence in these areas among young people involved in crime who had become obsessed with “vendettas and honour”. “There has been a kind of radicalisation that I would compare to any radicalised group in the world, where it’s escalated to people being able to do horrific things very quickly,” he said.

So much so that the older gangsters are running scared.

“It has backfired for the older guys,” said Granath. “They used the kids to carry out shootings and now the kids are turning the guns back on them. These kids are starting their own small gangs, they are armed, and they are pushing their old bosses away. The older guys and the traditional organised crime bosses who were steering things, they have lost control of the violence.” 

The streets have become so unpredictable that many older gangsters are pressing the ejector seat button.

Police intelligence shows the number of criminals joining Sweden’s official gang exit programme has doubled in the last five years from around 50 to 100 a year.

“The popularity of the gang exit programme is growing. This is an indication there are too many young people taking over now, it’s like anarchy,” said Granath. Some of those people joining the exit programmes say there is something humiliating about being shot by a teenager if you are an older gang guy. They prefer to get shot or killed by a big guy, not a teenager.”

But whether the government can solve an inequality problem that blights much of Europe remains to be seen. In public now, the gang-busting message is more about immigration, terrorism and the drug trade. 

In January current prime minister Ulf Kristersson, who leads the governing centre right-wing alliance, described those responsible for gang related violence in Sweden as “the domestic terrorists of our times”. He said: “This crime will not end on its own. These people must be locked up. Those who are not Swedish citizens must be expelled from the country.”  

Supported by the far-right Sweden Democrats party, which supports the ruling tri-party coalition without being an official part of the government, Kristersson has plans to introduce controversial “stop and search zones”, put limits on immigration, make it easier for anonymous witnesses to give evidence, and increasing sentences for people who involve children in crime. 

In February, Swedish politician Ylva Johansson, the European Union’s Commissioner for Home Affairs, joined Kristersson in likening organised drug crime in Europe to terrorism. She blamed recreational drug users for the rise in gang crime in northern Europe, and specifically for the death of an 11-year-old girl killed after being caught in a drug-related shooting in Antwerp in January. 

Djane steers away from blaming drug users or the drug trade for Sweden’s complex cycle of violence. His instinct is that these shootings and seemingly endless vendettas will only stop once people start listening to those who are most likely to end up with a gun in their hands. 

As a result he is setting up a new initiative that aims to involve representatives from street gangs in a round table discussion about the causes of violence and possible solutions. 

“What we have been doing for a decade is clearly not working,” said Djane. “Sweden is experiencing these issues due to the ignorance and lack of competence by social welfare services and the police. There needs to be reform in how the state views these individuals and the conditions they live in.”

Meanwhile, as people seek a solution, teenagers like Abdi are lining up for a bleak future or an early death.

“Right now I don’t have much choice about my future,” said Abdi over the phone from the juvenile detention centre. “I’m locked up with criminals. Crime is all I know, is all I see, all I hear, all I eat. If I become free and have the possibility to get out of it [crime] I will, but I don’t know how. This is the only life I know. 

“I don’t think about my future, you take one day at the time. I stopped planning because what you plan, it never happens, so why should I plan? It’s up to God what the future is, so I will just follow my road and see where it leads to.”

When asked if he was scared of dying, as so many other young people in Sweden's crime wars have, he said: “I think the people who say they are not afraid are lying, especially when you live a life of crime. But I think God knows that my heart is good. I don’t think about growing old, it’s too far ahead. One day at the time.”