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2024-06-10 Europe
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How Sweden became a 'haven' for mafia gangs and the EU's gun crime capital off the back of surging...
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[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] … migration: As murders surge, police and politicians say the nation is at crisis point.
Over the course of one night last year, three people were killed in separate attacks across Sweden - three of many violent attacks to rock the country in 2023.
The first victim was an 18-year-old man who was shot dead in a Stockholm suburb on September 27. Just hours later, one man was killed and another was wounded in a shooting in Jordbro, south of the city.
Then, as if two killings weren't enough, Soha Saad - a 24-year-old kindergarten teacher living with her brother and parents - died in an explosion in Uppsala, west of Stockholm, in the early hours of September 28.
In the aftermath, one neighbour described the blast as being 'like a war scene' and 'something you see on the news from Afghanistan.'
The violence meted out across the region in those 12 hours made international headlines, but to many living in Sweden - did not come as a surprise.
In a series of interviews, Swedish academics, a politician and a high ranking police officer have spoken to MailOnline about the multi-faceted crisis, describing a nation at crisis point that is ill equipped to tackle the scale of the violence.
Jale Poljarevius, a senior police officer and chief of intelligence for Sweden's Mitt region, described the 'deadly violence' as being 'very serious' to MailOnline.
He said that although gang violence today has improved slightly from 'Black September,' when a new flare-up in violence will come can be unpredictable.
'That was a bad period in Sweden – September to October last year. Today it's a little bit better, but it's very insecure still because it can turn on and start with a new wave of violence at any time,' he said.
'Sometimes we make arrests of gang members and when they are put away, a vacuum opens, and then new gang members try to take over,' he said. Then 'they are fighting each other and you have new shootings and a new explosion of violence.'
Deadly violence linked to feuds between criminal gangs has escalated in recent years against the backdrop of high levels of migration into the country.
Hundreds of shootings and several bombings have been carried out - with a shooting earlier this week resulting in the death of an award-winning rapper named C. Gambino. Police - who say 62,000 people are linked to criminal networks in the country - have said they suspect the attack was gang related.
Meanwhile, Sweden's share of non-western population grew from 2 percent to 15 percent in just 20 years.
Mafia groups abroad have called the country a 'haven' for their activities, while organised crime groups have infiltrated business sectors and found ways to smuggle military-grade weapons into the country.
In response, Swedish police have been given new powers - such as the ability to declare 'visitation' or 'safe zones' in which officers have more temporary powers to increase their presence, and to search people, homes and vehicles.
But many, including within the government, have gone as far to call on a full closure of Sweden's borders to asylum seekers.
It is easy to see why some are calling for drastic measures. September 2023 was a particularly bloodthirsty month, with over 40 violent episodes and 12 deaths recorded in just 20 days - earning the moniker 'Black September'.
In all of 2023, 53 people were killed in shootings across Sweden, which is home to around 10.5 million people. In 2022, that figure stood at 62 - and Stockholm's per-capita murder rate was roughly 30 times that of London's.
The killings have turned Sweden, seen for many years from the outside as a peaceful Scandinavian welfare state, into the European Union's gun-homicide capital.
Gangsters carry out personal vendettas against each other - or hire youngsters to do their dirty work. Almost half the suspects in the gun-related murders in 2022 were aged between 15 and 20 - youngsters who have been groomed by gangs that are, statistics show, largely run by second-generation immigrants.
Young hitmen have admitted to being hired to shoot and kill rivals, being paid as much as a million krona (around £73,000) to do so, or as little as a few thousand.
Experts say the violence has been driven by a number of factors: Turf wars between gangs, a growing drugs market, an influx of guns into the market, growing inequality, high level of immigration and also a failure of migrant integration into society.
But gang activity in Sweden is not limited to street violence and drugs. Organised crime has also taken hold in the country, with many gangs also committing fraud.
The overall issue has led to uncomfortable debates.
The wealthy state has taken in more asylum seekers escaping the Middle East and the Balkans than many other European countries over the past three decades.
This has emboldened right-wing politicians in the country while leaving those on the left feeling nervous about vilifying immigrants and other vulnerable communities.
Some argue that there is a direct link to migration and gang crime in the country, while others argue that it is the unequal conditions in which migrants and others are either placed in or are raised in that push youngsters towards gangs.
Nevertheless, both sides tend to agree that there has been a failure to integrate many new arrivals into the country at a time when there is a growing inequality gap.
How to tackle the issue remains divisive.
Violence has begun to spread into more affluent areas of Sweden, but it is still deprived migrant communities that are seeing the worst of the killings.
Many of the immigrants who enter Sweden end up in these suburbs, meaning first, second and third generation migrants are brought up in satellite towns and council estates that are segregated on the outskirts of the country's main cities.
There, people have fewer economic prospects, increasing social inequality and, as a result, find it more challenging to integrate into society. Gangs often fill that void.
These are ideal conditions for gangs to recruit, with statistics showing that most gang shooting suspects are young men with foreign background - and are often first or second generation immigrants, and therefore Swedish citizens.
Göran Adamson, a political consultant and associate professor with a PhD from the London School of Economics (LSE), told MailOnline that there is a clear link between migration and the gang crime in Sweden.
Pointing to his 2020 study 'Migrants and Crime in Sweden in the 21st Century', he said someone with a migrant background can be two, three or even four times more likely to be involved with or a suspect in criminal activity than an average Swede.
'When some people say there is no connection between migration and crime, they are not telling the truth,' he said, adding: 'The data from the crime prevention agency tells us this [...] these are just the bare bones statistics.'
He continued: 'In the suburbs, there is a lot of shooting and a lot of killing going on and its mostly gang related. I would say 99 percent gang related.
'When someone is shot - if someone who is under 20 - is shot or two people are shot in a suburb of Stockholm, you can almost count on them being members of one gang who are killing members of another gang, but these are still young guys.'
Manne Gerell, an associate professor of criminology at Malmo University, told MailOnline that generally, crime in Sweden is trending downwards.
He said the country does have a 'very big problem with violence' largely limited to gangs. Now, though, more people are being caught in the crossfire as turf wars and vendettas spill out from Sweden's marginalised suburbs.
GROWING CONCERN
Unsurprisingly, the violence has left many Swedes concerned.
Swedish newspapers regularly splash stories about gangland attacks on their front pages, and political parties promising a tough response are risen in popularity.
One such party is the Sweden Democrats - a party born out of a neo-Nazi movement at the end of the 1980s which has pivoted in recent years to be a more mainstream political party. It now forms part of the ruling conservative coalition government.
Like Adamson, Charlie Weimers - a Swedish MEP and member of the party, said there is a clear link between migration and gang crime.
'This is why my party has a zero asylum policy for Sweden,' he told MailOnline. 'We must give ourselves the breathing room to start dealing with these problems, because they are systemic and threaten the basic functions of Swedish society.'
Weimers continued: 'In this gang related criminality you have everything from street thugs - who kill for £50 - to very well organised criminals who infiltrate municipalities in order to control welfare payments and other functions of municipalities.
'The first problem - the street problem - is on the news every evening.
'But the latter problem is threatening the basic function of society, the stability of Sweden as a state, because it is then turning into more of a classic mafia. Historically that's been very hard to root out and we need to try to stop this before it's too late.'
The violence has led to many asking: what has led to the rise in gang attacks?
'Sweden had been guaranteed peace, order and quiet for a long time,' Police officer Poljarevius said. 'You take this for granted.
'But when you combine unsuccessful integration and - from late 1990s – globalisation, we have migration that has not been [handled well],' this causes issues, he said. 'In Sweden you must have some sort of normal migration, but the rates have been very high in Sweden during the 1990s and start of the 2000s.'
He also said that police have not been able to keep up with the technical advances being made by gangs .
'Technical development and digitalisation - criminal gangs are using that,' he said.
'Police forces have not been as successful in integrating our systems or our ability to fight crimes with the technical part. So this gap between ability to commit crime and capability to fight crime has just increased for many, many years.'
Similarly, Adamson said Swedish society has not been set up to handle the level of crime.
'Everything in Sweden has been tailor made for a situation with much less crime,' he said. 'Sweden has been tailored to cope with around 25 percent of the murder rate we have. Some say we need to build many more prisons and we need to change the structure of the legal system, but these things take 10 years or 20 years.
'There's a huge backlog. We are not prepared for this, and we keep being unprepared for the escalating violence, which means we can't handle it properly.'
Adamson said a lawyer acquaintance has warned the system could collapse under the strain 'because we simply have no means of coping with the rapid increase of serious crime, and we don't know what's going to happen after that.'
Police say much of the recent violence was down to a drug gang known as 'Foxtrot' - led by notorious leader Rawa Majid, 'the Kurdish Fox' and based in Uppsala - and the fallout after it split into smaller groups.
Majid fled to Turkey in 2018 and fell out with his right-hand man Ismail Abdo, aka 'Strawberry'. Amid the bloodthirsty feud, Abdo's mother was shot dead - also in September 2023, also in Uppsala.
Speaking in April 2022, Sweden's then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson proclaimed that migrant integration in the country had failed, and that it had in turn led to parallel societies forming and gang violence escalating.
Since then, a general election was held in September 2022 and swung to the right, with a minority government forming under Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson.
The right-wing coalition vowed to crack down on violence by tightening migration policies, doubling prison sentences for offences committed in 'gang environments', widen the use of electronic surveillance and even deport criminals who are not Swedish citizens.
PM Ulf Kristersson reiterated this after the spate of killings in September 2023.
'The wave of violence is... unprecedented in Sweden, but it is also unprecedented in Europe, no other country has a situation like the one we have,' he said at the time.
'Political naivety and cluelessness have brought us to this point. Irresponsible immigration policy and failed integration have brought us to this point.
'Exclusion and parallel societies feed the criminal gangs, providing space for them to ruthlessly recruit children and train future killers. Swedish legislation is not designed for gang wars and child soldiers. But we are now changing that,' he vowed.
Gerell, too, said there was 'no denying' a connection between the violence and migration, but he noted that many of the migrants involved in gang violence are second or third generation immigrants having been born in Sweden.
'I think you can make a distinction,' he said. 'It might be because of migration, and [it might be] because of failed integration, because most of the people involved in this violence were born in Sweden, so they were not migrants - their parents were.'
But, he said, 'you can't really deny the fact that most of both the victims and the perpetrators of this gang violence have a foreign background, so there is a connection to immigration and/or integration, which I think cannot be denied.'
There is something about Sweden, however, that appears to set it apart from other countries, Gerell said. He pointed to Germany, saying that while the country to Sweden's south has also seen high levels of immigration, 'shootings are going down'.
So what sets Sweden apart? 'It's really hard to tell,' he said.
'I do believe that immigration, integration, segregation is part of the answer, but it cannot be the whole answer.'
'I think another partial explanation might be that the Swedish government and Swedish agencies, and particularly the police, took too long to respond to these problems and let them grow too strong and too powerful - these criminal networks.'
Adamson said that while Swedish people typically have a high level of trust in the state, migrants - many of whom live in segregated communities - have less.
'If you come from a culture where the state is very weak then you have other structures - you have your family, you have your extended family, you have your clan, you have your tribe - and you care very little about the state, people it makes more sense to join a gang because the gang is where you have your affiliation, where you have your trust and honour and then you can fight against the state,' he said.
'You see the state as your enemy, and then if your state is also your enemy, it's OK to abuse the state and to try to get money from the state.'
MEP Weimers said that 'policies in Sweden were unusually soft. Crime policy, for instance, and policing.'
'[These policies were] created for a very cohesive country - a homogeneous country - which had one of the world's highest degrees of social trust. The system was not built for dealing with these kind of problems, and that has been exploited.'
He pointed to a report from April in which a journalist in Montenegro had gained access to hundreds of thousands of messages sent between criminals, in which they described Sweden as a 'haven' for their activities. 'This is how criminals have viewed our country due to our very lax policies on crime,' Weimers said.
'That was one of the most important reasons why my party grew and why we were able to form a new Conservative government in 2022, but ever since the 60s, Sweden has had a combination of soft crime policy, multiculturalism and mass migration - and this has put Sweden in this situation.'
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Posted by Skidmark 2024-06-10 06:47||
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File under: Migrants/Illegal Immigrants
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Posted by Procopius2k 2024-06-10 15:24||
2024-06-10 15:24||
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