 "How Swedish gangs are recruiting children to carry out contract killings")
Sweden is in crisis.
Gangs are exploiting loopholes in laws to employ children as young as age 11 to carry out contract killings.
The country has seen a spate of murders in recent years across the country as gangs vie to control the drug market and take each other out.
In 2023, 53 people were killed in shootings.
Many of these deaths were in public and included innocent victims.
But what do we know?
Let’s take a closer look
Contract killers
As per The Telegraph, gangs have recruited dozens of child contract killers across Sweden.
This is mostly done by middlemen on social media who offer around $13,000.
Gang crime in Sweden is organized and complex.
The leaders, who are abroad, employ middlemen to hire for them.
These intermediaries use encrypted messaging such as Telegram, Snapchat and Signal to recruit teens.
Fernando, for example, a hitman for a Swedish narcotics gang, is 14.
The youth was playing a Fifa video game at his youth club when his instructions arrived via text.
Fernando was ordered to collect guns for the hit, head to the target’s home and empty out the clip.
“Yeah, I understand brother,” Fernando replied.
He picked up two pistols, a Kalashnikov rifle as well as an accomplice before heading for the hit in a Stockholm suburb.
Impact Shorts
More Shorts“If the [entrance] is locked, take a stone and break it,” the middleman known as Louise Gucci instructs. “Then you do your thing. After, when you come back to the hood, you put the Kalashnikov in the same place. Then go home and shower and wash your clothes.”
Fernando is hardly alone.
According to The Telegraph, murder cases with child suspects have skyrocketed in Sweden.
In the first eight months of 2023, that number was at 31 suspects.
The figure for the same period this year is 102, according to prosecutors in Sweden.
Authorities say many of the children are from poor or foreign backgrounds.
According to Express, Sweden has the highest per capita rate of gun violence in the EU.
Access to illegal guns – largely from the Balkans, according to police – is plentiful.
‘Can’t wait’
“Bro, I can’t wait for my first dead body,” wrote an 11-year-old boy on Instagram in Sweden.
“Stay motivated, it’ll come,” answered his 19-year-old contact.
He went on to offer the child to carry out a murder, as well as clothes and transport to the scene of the crime, according to a police investigation of the exchange last year in the western province of Varmland seen by AFP.
In this case, four men aged 18 to 20 are accused of recruiting four minors aged 11 to 17 to work for a criminal gang. All were arrested before carrying out the crimes.
The preliminary inquiry contains a slew of screenshots that the youngsters sent to each other of themselves posing with weapons, some with bare chests or donning hooded masks.
Questioned by police, the 11-year-old said he wrote the message to seem “cool” and “not show his fear”.
Why are they recruiting children?
Because the age of criminal responsibility is 15.
“It is organised as a kind of (job) market where missions are published on discussion forums, and the people accepting the assignments are increasingly young,” Johan Olsson, the head of the Swedish police’s National Operations Department (NOA), told reporters last month.
Hits are subcontracted with the parties only communicating online, Stockholm University criminology professor Sven Granath told AFP.
“The group chats have adventurous and exciting names, like “bombing today” and “who wants to shoot someone in Stockholm”,” Lisa dos Santos, a Swedish prosecutor, told The Telegraph. “It’s not like before, when they used encrypted phones on a closed network. Now you can take a gang job on Snapchat.”
Santos relayed a recent case where a 16-year-old killed a father of two and then tried to kill his wife and children.
“It’s so brutal that you can hardly believe it,” Ms de Santos told the newspaper. “The father was shot lying on the couch, the mother was shot in the back. She was a doctor, so she tried to save herself and the child, and they both survived. I would say that’s the worst thing I’ve ever had in my career.”
Gangs are even recruiting girls or children with mental disabilities – so that victims will likely not see them coming.
Others recruit in person, seeking out kids hanging around in their neighbourhoods.
Granath said the children who are recruited are often struggling in school, have addiction problems or attention deficit disorders, or have already been in trouble with the law.
“They are recruited into conflicts they have no connection to – they’re just mercenaries,” he said, adding that they haven’t necessarily been a member of a gang before.
Ruthless exploitation
Some children even seek out the contracts, according to a report from the National Council for Crime Prevention (BRA), as they look for cash, an adrenaline rush, recognition or a sense of belonging.
They’re drawn in by flashy clothes as well as the promise of undying loyalty, experts say.
“Nowadays everybody wants to be a murderer,” Viktor Grewe, a 25-year-old former gang member who had his first run-in with police when he was 13, told AFP.
“It’s incredibly sad to see that this is what kids aspire to,” he said, with some “crimfluencers” glorify criminal lifestyles on TikTok.
There is a “ruthless exploitation of young people”, Tony Quiroga, a police commander in Orebro, west of Stockholm, told AFP.
The criminal subcontractors “don’t want to take any risks themselves”, he said, protecting both themselves and those higher up the chain.
“They hide behind pseudonyms on social media and put several filters between themselves and the culprit.”
In Orebro, volunteers patrol the streets of disadvantaged neighbourhoods to talk to youths about the risks of falling under the gangs’ control.
Grewe, who turned his back on gang life when he was 22, said young criminals don’t expect to live beyond the age of 25.
According to a recent BRA report, recruiting kids is part of the gangs’ business model, where children recruit even younger children – and once they’re in, it’s hard to leave.
Quiroga despaired that the police are up against conflicts “that never end”.
With inputs from agencies
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