Pirate's Cove

Sven and Gustaf need to be dealt with

Children carry out surge of contract killings as Swedish gangs exploit loophole in the law

Fernando, a hitman for a Swedish narcotics gang, checks his phone as it pings with his latest orders: collect the guns, go to the target’s front door and fire until he runs out of bullets.

“Yeah, I understand brother,” he replies casually. He collects two pistols, a Kalashnikov rifle and an accomplice, before hurrying to their target in a suburb of Stockholm.

But this is no ordinary gang hit. Fernando is 14, a teenage assassin who was playing the video game Fifa in his youth club when the orders arrived by text.

He is one among dozens of child contract killers in Sweden, recruited by gang middle-men on social media who pay as much as 150,000 kroner (£13,000) per job.

The number of murder cases involving child suspects in Sweden, which has the highest per capita rate of gun violence in the EU, has exploded over the past year. The figures rose from 31 counts in the first eight months of 2023 to 102 in the same period of this year, according to Sweden’s prosecution authority.

What has been happening in Sweden recently?

Swedish prosecutors and police say the use of children – many of them from an impoverished or foreign background – to commit murders on that scale is unprecedented. One recent case involved a boy of just 11 years old.

Children are the ideal catspaw for Sweden’s gangs: those aged under 15 are too young to be prosecuted, a quirk of Swedish law that critics say is in urgent need of reform.

Hmm, I guess they mean “most” if not all are imports to Sweden. Fernando isn’t exactly a Swedish name.

Ms de Santos recalled one case where a 16-year-old boy fatally shot a father-of-two at his home in Västberga and then went upstairs to kill his wife and children.

The boy told the mother to turn around and shot her in the back. The bullet passed through her body and continued through a Winnie the Pooh toy held by her two-year-old child, who was also wounded.

Yeah, there’s some pretty brutal stuff going on. Import the 3rd world get the 3rd world.

The current wave of gang violence, from December 2022 onwards, is being fuelled by a power struggle between Foxtrot, one of Sweden’s largest organised crime networks, and the rival Dalen faction.

Two men at the heads of Foxtrot and Dalen have fled abroad, where they run their operations via middle-men. Rawa Majid, the leader of Foxtrot under the alias “Kurdish Fox”, is believed to be hiding in Turkey or Iran.

The other is Greek.

Many of the children come from a migrant background, such as those who arrived in Sweden during the 2015 refugee crisis. Some have failed to integrate into Swedish society, and that is “one piece” of the puzzle, she said.

Obviously, this is the fault of the Swedish government and Swedish people, not those who came in and refused to assimilate, wanting to keep their own cultures.

“With the first generation [of refugees and migrants to Sweden], they may not learn the language, and do cleaning jobs, things like that, and their children may see that Dad is working around the clock but doesn’t get anything for it,” Ms Frödin said.

As for young girls, they “feel stared at in Sweden for wearing the hijab and told that they are being oppressed. If they go into the city they are told to leave the shops”.

Perhaps the Swedish politicians should have considered the ramifications before they imported people incompatible with Swedish culture.