Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson held an emergency meeting with the chief of the armed forces and the head of the national police on September 29. The task is to coordinate their actions against the gangster mayhem that swept the law-abiding Scandinavian country. The military is expected to take over policing in the cities to replace and free up the cops who will concentrate solely on organized crime groups.
The day before, the head of the kingdom’s government addressed the nation.
«More children and completely innocent people are now suffering from brutal violence. I cannot emphasize enough how serious the situation is. We have been led to it by our political naivety and ignorance. We were brought here by our irresponsible immigration policies and poor integration. Overseas mafias and parallel communities feed the criminal gangs. They are now ruthlessly recruiting children into their ranks and training future killers. Neither Sweden nor any other country in Europe has ever faced anything like this before. We will have to use all the necessary resources», Kristersson said.
His speech, which lasted almost seven minutes in prime time, was a reaction to the «bloody day». In just 12 hours, three people (a young man, an elderly man and a woman) were killed as a result of two shootings and an explosion in Stockholm and Uppsala. A total of 12 citizens became victims of criminal violence in September.
In February this year, a report by the Council for Crime Prevention revealed that six times more people were killed by firearms in Sweden than in all other Scandinavian countries combined. For the entire year of 2022, there were 391 shooting episodes, 62 deaths and 107 injuries. As of mid-September, there had already been 261 such episodes, 34 killed and 71 injured.
Sweden has the highest rate of street murders per capita in the EU. If in most European countries per one million inhabitants were from 0 to 4 deaths with the illegal use of firearms, here this indicator in 2021 was at 18 (!) such crimes.
It is recorded that the «mafia osprey» is crawling from Sweden to Norway. In this regard, the justice ministers of neighboring countries met on September 27 to discuss joint actions to combat organized crime.
Kristersson traveled to New York to learn from the experience of his American colleagues, who are savvy in the fight against gang mayhem.
«I met with the mayor of New York last week to learn how they acted in a similar situation: surveillance cameras, facial recognition, weapon detectors. Sweden should use all this too», the prime minister said in his address.
The situation with organized crime began to deteriorate in the mid-noughties. A sharp spike was noted in 2013. And the growth rate only began to intensify. A completely new trend emerged: conflicts in the criminal environment began to arise not so much between individual defendants, but between entire groups. In other words, real gang wars of criminal clans, which are (mostly) engaged in drug trafficking, have begun.
Police attribute the current spate of violence to a split in the Turkish organized crime group Foxtrot. The main antagonists were its two leaders — Rawa Majid, nicknamed the Kurdish Fox, and Ismail Abdo. The latter’s mother was shot dead by Fox’s men. The latter began to take revenge… Other organized crime groups — Dalennätverket and Bandidos — were drawn into the showdown.
The Foxtrot crime group emerged in the late 2010s. The family of its founder Majid, now 37 years old, moved to Sweden from Iran and settled in the city of Uppsala, located 70 kilometers from Stockholm. For crimes committed on Swedish territory (burglary and cigarette smuggling), Kurdish Fox has been behind bars. Released in 2018, he went first to Iraq, then to Turkey, where he obtained citizenship in 2020. Majid managed to remotely («from the shores of the Bosphorus») form his organized crime group. The leadership includes about a dozen other people between the ages of 25 and 35. Among them are Majid’s relatives. In recent years Foxtrot is primarily engaged in smuggling large quantities of drugs, which are resold to other groups.
The Swedish mafia has its own unique trick: killers in gang wars are usually minors.
«We are talking about 14–16-year-olds, who under humane Swedish laws will get a maximum of four years for murder. Once out of prison, these guys, already prepared for violence, will seek a place in the criminal milieu. That’s the future scenario we need to be wary of», says Manne Gehrel, a criminologist at Malmö University.
There is another peculiarity: criminal bosses (about 30 «bosses») direct the actions of their associates from abroad, hiding in Turkey, Somalia, Iraq and Mexico.
According to police estimates, in a relatively small Sweden (just over 10.5 million citizens) directly involved in criminal activity or have links to it about 30 thousand people.
This is not even Sicily with its Cosa Nostra…