More and more young people are getting involved in the gang war that has raged in Sweden in recent months, the country’s national police chief said on Friday, after three people were killed in violent incidents in 24 hours that shocked the public.

“We are in a situation where children are contacting criminal organizations on their own” asking to commit murders, Sweden’s police chief Anders Thornberg said during a press conference.

Sweden has long been plagued by violence linked to rival gangs and gangs fighting to control the drug and arms trade.

This violence has escalated in recent months due to a confrontation that has broken out within one of these gangs. Incidents of shootings and explosions are almost a daily occurrence.

“Criminals are ruthless,” Thornberg said, describing the system they follow when they want to take out their rivals: they use people outside the gangs, often minors. They “give them weapons and the direction” to go for the attack.

The victims are also young, most of the time.

According to a tally by state television network SVT, 12 people were killed in shootings and explosions in September, the highest number recorded in a single month in four years.

On the night of Wednesday to Thursday, three homicides were recorded, the victims of which were, among others, an 18-year-old young man and a 25-year-old woman.

“Children should have faith in the future, children and young people should not want to become murderers,” Thornberg stressed.

Mats Lindström, a police officer in the Stockholm area who has examined many messages through which orders for the killings are given, confirmed that it is often young people who ask to take on these “contracts”.

“We see that they write: ‘Are there contracts? Me and my friend are available for 200,000 kroner,’” he explained. They do it “to gain status, to become somebody, to have ‘the air of a killer'”, as one young man revealed to him during an investigation.

In August 2023, 69 juveniles were in pre-trial detention in Sweden, compared to 14 in the same month in 2021.

Army

On Thursday, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristerson said he would ask for the help of the military to help the police in their work and end the violence.

“I’m on your side, we’re going after the gangs and we’re going to beat them. They will be held accountable to justice,” Christerson emphasized during his televised speech.

He estimated that “Swedish law has no provisions for gang warfare and child soldiers, but we have started the process to change that.”

The Social Democrats (left) and the Sweden Democrats (far right) proposed mobilizing the army to assist the police in their work.

“I have called the head of the national police and the head of the army to see how the armed forces can help the police to deal with the gangs,” Christerson pointed out.

“Integration failed”

“Crime has reached a level we have never seen before. The situation is serious in Uppsala and throughout the country,” said Uppsala official Katarina Bowal.

“It’s possible that this is connected to the infighting” nationwide between criminal gangs, he added.

Christerson also succeeded against “the naivety and recklessness that led us here. Reckless immigration and failure to integrate led us” to this situation, he estimated.

The Swedish prime minister, head of the Moderates, struck a deal with the far-right last year to come to power. In parliament, it has allied itself with the far-right, anti-immigration Sweden Democrats party, which is not part of the government, however.