Organised crime
Sweden’s fightback against the gangs
Shootings are down. The government has taken a tough line. Will voters reward it?
Richard Milne in Stockholm and Gothenburg
Police respond to an explosion at an apartment block in Stockholm in 2023 © Nils Petter Nilsson/Alamy“No shootings in May.”
The news headline in Sweden this year was as banal as it was extraordinary.
For around a decade the rich Scandinavian state, once feted as an all but ideal society, suffered more fatal shootings per capita than any other country in western Europe.
But the numbers are now in marked decline as the country fights back against a wave of gang violence involving foreign criminals and — in many instances — children as young as 12.
“The fact that you have headlines saying no shootings at all this month: it says something,” Ulf Kristersson, the centre-right Swedish prime minister, tells the FT.
His rightwing government is bidding for re-election on Sunday with a boast that after four years of intense effort — including boosting police resources, allowing children to be jailed, and arresting criminal leaders in the Middle East and beyond — it has tamed gang crime.
When it came to power in 2022, there was more than one deadly shooting a week, a remarkable statistic in a country of just 10mn people.
In that previous election year, there were 391 shootings in Sweden, resulting in 62 deaths.
This year up until August 6, there were just 48 shootings and 12 deaths.
Gunnar Strömmer, Sweden’s justice minister, calls gang crime “a systematic threat to society” on a par with or above that posed by terrorism.
On a visit to Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city, he notes that almost a year has gone by since a deadly shooting there.
So bad was the country’s reputation that politicians in neighbouring Denmark and Norway talked about “Swedish conditions” as shorthand for everything they did not want — spiralling crime after a period of almost unchecked immigration.
Swedish gangs prospered, using digital platforms to offer 12, 13 and 14-year-olds cash to commit murders or bombings, at home or abroad.
“Crime has been one of our main exports,” says Alexander Wallenius, lead investigator at the police’s national operations department, of a country more used to touting the success of its start-ups or music industry.
He adds that the “No shooting” headline “should be the normal.
It is a sign that the trend has changed.”
Long known as an oasis of social democracy, Sweden has shifted gradually in recent decades to some of the most rightwing policies in Europe in everything from the privatisation of schools and healthcare to law and order and restrictive immigration policies.
Its success on gang crime represents a rare example in Europe of mainstream parties — albeit aided by nationalists — prevailing on an issue that rightwing populists had invoked to rally support, with results that seemed barely conceivable at the start of the government’s term.
Still, there is a strong possibility that the leftwing opposition will win Sunday’s elections.
Some on the right grumble about not receiving credit for cutting shootings by 80 per cent since their 2022 peak or reducing the number of asylum seekers to its lowest in four decades.
“There’s a lot of discussion about the Winston Churchill effect,” says Mattias Karlsson, chief ideologue of the nationalist Sweden Democrats, the country’s biggest rightwing party, which is outside the government but supports it in parliamentary votes.
His reference is to Britain’s 1945 election, when Churchill, having won the war in Europe, was kicked out of office in a landslide.
Problems remain.
Shootings may be much lower, but bombings have increased.
Two of the main gang leaders are behind bars after dramatic arrests in Turkey and Mexico.
But the biggest prize of all — Rawa Majid, a criminal known as the Kurdish Fox, who heads the most notorious gang, Foxtrot — remains free and is presumed to be living in Iran after stays in Turkey and Iraq.
“We are far from being done when it comes to gang criminality,” says Lawen Redar, an MP for the opposition Social Democrats, which currently lead the polls in a race that is getting tighter and tighter.
Rent-a-thugs
It is hard to exaggerate how bad the problem was in 2022.
Scarcely a day went by without a shooting or bombing in the previously peaceful country.
If anything, the headlines then became so commonplace that they were often overlooked.
“At first, the shootings were in suburbs I’d never been to,” says one British longtime resident of Stockholm.
“Then they were 10km away, 5km away.
Finally, a classmate of my son was shot dead.”
The violence was initially centred on Sweden’s three biggest cities, in particular Malmö in the south, the main gateway into the country for newly arrived immigrants.
But police say that the three big Swedish gangs — known as Foxtrot, Rumba and Dalen — mostly recruited from second-generation immigrants who had been born and raised locally as they pushed motorcycle gangs out of the drug trade.
Gradually, the violence moved to other urban centres such as the industrial city of Eskilstuna and the smart university town of Uppsala as gangs moved on from killing each other to shooting relatives of rivals.
Perpetrators started getting younger and younger.
“They started using younger kids because they saw you got eight years in prison as an 18-year-old but just eight months for a 17-year-old.
Younger kids recruited even younger kids.
Soon, we were working with children as young as 12,” says Camila Salazar Atías at Fryshuset, the country’s largest youth organisation, which runs programmes to stop young people joining gangs and help them leave.
She adds that for a long time the police were “not managing to solve crimes, so the message was: do what you want”.
Police say the gangs became involved in something close to a public relations battle.
Their recruitment of youths depended on their own brand, including links to popular rappers as well as regular media discussion of the gang leaders, complete with nicknames such as Strawberry and the Greek.
“All three gangs wanted to build their brand, using emojis, logos, music,” says Wallenius at the police’s national operations department.
“The leaders of the criminal organisations today have to be very public.
If you are not public, you would not have the opportunity to attract young perpetrators to commit crimes.
It is the opposite to how it used to work.”
The gangs started offering what the police call “crime as a service” — using digital platforms to recruit young people to commit crimes in Sweden and beyond.
One example from recent years posted to social media and provided by police talks about “rent-a-thugs” being needed, and offers SKr800,000 ($84,000) to commit an unspecified crime with “travel, housing” provided.
“They are grooming people to think they are important for the organisation,” Wallenius adds.
“Usually they are not.
They use them like a plastic fork.”
The government says that a digital crime platform was used by Iran in 2024 when it recruited Swedish gangs to throw a hand grenade and shoot at the Israeli embassy in Stockholm in two separate incidents.
The gangs started working their way into Swedish society, from the court system and political parties to the police and its welfare system, looking for new ways to gain information and make money.
Strömmer, the justice minister, estimates that just half of the gangs’ revenues come from drugs, with the rest coming from defrauding the welfare system.
He says the authorities are still trying to push back against the gangs’ infiltration of “government and local decision-making”.
‘The bus driver who had a bad feeling’
Police and politicians in Sweden say there was no single “silver bullet” to reducing the violence but highlight three sets of actions.
Police changed tactics.
They had previously investigated each shooting and bombing separately, often missing links between similar crimes.
Wallenius says that from 2024 the police’s national co-ordination centre collected data, tried to find patterns and connections between different crimes, as well as identifying the instigators.
Now the police have moved away from behaving reactively.
“We are trying to stop crimes and act in an early phase so we, for instance, get them for an attempt to commit a murder,” he adds.
He says that the authorities needed help from all of society including neighbours, companies, “the bus driver who had a bad feeling, hotel staff who sensed something suspicious”.
The government also put resources into wooing foreign governments in countries where many of the gang leaders were based.
Strömmer travelled widely, courting authorities in countries such as Tunisia, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Iraq.
Last year, that approach paid dividends as two of the three main gang leaders were arrested: Ismail Abdo, known as Strawberry, in Turkey; and Mikael Tenezos, known as The Greek, in Mexico.
Gunnar Strömmer talks to people in the Stockholm suburb of Skärholmen in 2024 after a man was shot dead. The justice minister says having more police with better tools has helped to cut gun crime © Claudio Bresciani/TT/AFP/Getty ImagesStrömmer says the key was to show there were “mutual benefits” to other countries as the gang leaders “pose a threat where they are and they come with a large risk for violence and other severe crime in the countries where they stay”.
He adds that it was easy to find common interest “without selling out anything that is important for us”.
The final element was a slew of restrictive measures such as bringing in harsher punishments, making it easier for police to use wiretaps, allocating more resources to police, and lowering the criminal age of responsibility to 14 to tackle the use of ever-younger perpetrators.
The justice minister says that police can now listen to gang members discussing crimes they want to commit and can intervene beforehand.
“We have increased the number of policemen during these years and equipped them with new tools — I think that might be the most critical part,” Strömmer adds.
But not everyone is positive.
Many of the parties on the left say Sweden has forsaken its values of humanity and solidarity in a push for ever-tougher penalties, and argue more needs to be done to improve the economies of deprived areas and to incentivise children to turn their backs on gangs.
Fryshuset’s Salazar Atías, who is standing for the centre-left Social Democrats in the elections, adds that putting 14-year-olds in jail is what worries her most.
“For a while, people were blind: we need to do something, anything.
But we are doing things that we know don’t work, such as prison for kids.
Making sure they stay in school should be the number one thing. But it takes time and resources.”
‘Not that grateful . . . for not crashing’
The Social Democrats have long looked on course for a big victory in Sunday’s elections.
They argue that the right’s focus on crime and immigration overlooked what voters really cared about: the economy and welfare.
The government counters that one or more parties on the left have voted against almost every restrictive measure they have passed.
“The fact that we have reduced deadly shootings does not mean that the violence is gone.
It does not mean that we can just stay put and say, ‘Well, now things are solved, now we can get back to normal,’” says Prime Minister Kristersson.
He adds that the opposition is “basically soft on crime”.
Not true, retorts the Social Democrats’ Redar, who argues her party is close to Kristersson’s Moderates on most measures.
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson campaigns in Malmö ahead of Sunday’s election. He says voters will not reward his party for reducing crime as that is what they expect their government to do © Tom Little/ReutersKristersson adds that he did not expect to be rewarded by voters for reducing shootings more than expected.
“Normally, you are not that grateful to the aircraft’s captain for not crashing,” he says.
“Things shouldn’t be the way they used to be, and now we have made a turnaround, creating a more normal situation in Sweden, and I think many people think that’s actually the job we asked for.”
Instead, the right says that it needed to restore security in order to turn attention to the economy, one of the fastest-growing in Europe thanks largely to its thriving start-ups and business sector.
Opinion polls suggest the race is tightening even if the Social Democrats and the left remain in the lead.
Fireworks in a Thermos
Gang violence may have diminished in Sweden, but is far from over.
One reason bombings are stubbornly high, say police, is that they are much easier to carry out than shootings.
Throwing a hand grenade or detonating homemade explosives using material from fireworks in a Thermos is much less demanding for a 12-year-old than identifying a target and shooting at the right time, says Wallenius.
The purpose of shootings and bombings is also different, officials say: the former is about eliminating rivals, the latter about sending a message or blackmailing people.
Police and politicians say a number of broader problems remain for Sweden.
One is simple complacency.
If the public thinks victory has been achieved over gangs and political attention moves on, some worry that the criminals will find new tactics and society will lower its guard.
“We still need to have a sense of urgency,” says Wallenius.
“When you have bombings and shootings every day, it’s easy to have that urgency.
If it goes out of the headlines, it’s easy to lose it.”
Some are worried that the focus has been too much on law and order and less on preventing children from being attracted by the lure of easy money — which would require a focus on schools, social services and integration of immigrants.
Youths are still being recruited online; the government has had success in taking down criminal adverts from TikTok and Snap quickly, but Wallenius says that Signal, the encrypted messaging service, remains a problem.
Often, a seemingly innocent ad on another platform will ask young people to sign up to join a group on Signal where they will be recruited.
The main gang leader, Majid aka the Kurdish Fox, is still at large in Iran, and his Foxtrot gang is the only one the police still classify as nationally important.
Officers say it may not be quite the force it once was but it is still powerful.
The infiltration of the Swedish state by gangs and their use of the welfare system, including with apparently legal companies, will also take a long time to reverse, officials concede.
Some in the Social Democrats even argue the government has not done enough.
“We are far from being done when it comes to gang criminality.
Sweden needs a Rico [US-style Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations] law to attack the mafia structures.
We need to do more on prevention,” says Redar.
Strömmer agrees that more needs to be done, but he is also looking at using some of the tools developed for organised crime to combat other offences such as welfare fraud and domestic violence.
“I have seen some analysis claiming that we have been too successful, that by reducing deadly shootings by 80 per cent, people tend to draw the conclusion that the problem is solved, let’s move on to something else,” the justice minister adds.
“I am not so sure about that.
People have noticed the change.”
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