Sweden’s Gang Crisis: Bombings, Teen Hitmen, and a Nation on Edge
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- Tags: gang crime, gang violence, gang warfare, gangs, migrant crime, Stockholm, Sweden
The adult education center Campus Risbergska school in Orebro, Sweden, on February 6, 2025, two days after a shooting there left eleven people dead.
Jonathan NACKSTRAND / AFP
Sweden, once regarded as one of Europe’s most peaceful nations, is now grappling with levels of gang violence unprecedented on the continent.
According to Euronews, Stockholm is one of the most dangerous cities in Europe: it has recorded 55 shootings up until August this year, resulting in nine deaths, while nationwide, there have been 113 incidents, leaving 33 people dead.
The country has become a hotspot for drug gangs that often deploy teenage hitmen and makeshift explosives in their violent turf wars.
The scale of the problem is not confined to the capital. Malmö, Gothenburg, and Uppsala are also scarred by shootings, bombings, and killings linked to rival groups.
Sweden’s homicide rate involving firearms ranked third highest in Europe in 2022, behind only Montenegro and Albania. This marks a stark departure from the country’s historic image of Nordic order and stability.
Arvid Hallén, Program Director at the Oikos conservative think tank in Sweden, told europeanconservative.com:
Clearly, we have had for a long time a very strongly increasing amount of crime, especially gangster-associated crime. These criminal organisations, to a quite exceptional degree, commit crimes using guns and bombings—at a level which is unique in Europe.
A series of high-profile attacks has highlighted the crisis. In April this year, three young men were gunned down in an Uppsala hair salon in a feud between two gangs. In August, a man was killed in a shooting outside a mosque in Örebro.
The Swedish government has been forced to introduce sweeping changes to combat the crisis. New legislation will lower the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 13 for serious offences such as murder and bombings, aiming to disrupt the gangs’ recruitment of minors.
“The reason the government is lowering the age at which you can prosecute people and put them in jail is because these gangs use very young people. We have underage people committing murders, and we haven’t been able to punish them properly,” Hallén explains.
Police say the gangs’ leaders increasingly operate from abroad, issuing orders via social media and encrypted messaging apps. Children as young as 12 are recruited to carry out shootings or plant explosives, lured by the promise of money and status. Europol has warned that what began in Sweden is now spreading across Europe “like wildfire.”
The fear generated by this wave of violence is tangible. A recent survey shows that nearly one in three women aged 16 to 29 have avoided going out at night for fear of threats or attacks.
Hallén argues that the roots of the problem lie in decades of mismanaged immigration policy:
This is all, of course, a direct consequence of the last few decades of irresponsible immigration policy in Sweden. If Sweden had had mass immigration from Denmark or Germany or Poland, we wouldn’t have these issues, but the problem is that we’ve had immigration from the Middle East, North Africa, mostly the Horn of Africa. These groups are much harder to integrate.
This is one of the most important issues people in general care about most in politics, and has been for the last five, ten years. That’s why the current government was elected to fight this kind of crime and to reduce third-world immigration.
There are some signs of progress. Sweden recorded a fall in homicides in 2024 compared with the previous year, with police crediting new surveillance powers and tougher laws. However, gun violence remains the most common cause of violent death and claimed 45 lives in 2024, eight fewer than in 2023.
“The policies seem to be working quite well, but crime is still at a very high level and there is still a lot of work to be done,” according to Arvid Hallén.
Indeed, the bombings continue, rising from 149 incidents in 2023 to 317 in 2024. In January of this year, Stockholm endured more than 30 bombings in a single month, most of them linked to gang extortion schemes.
The crisis has also become a flashpoint in European politics.
On the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the European migration crisis, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán repeatedly contrasted Sweden’s gang-ridden streets with Hungary’s tougher law-and-order approach.
In his latest post published on X on Friday, September 19th, he wrote:
Migrants didn’t fall from the sky. Someone opened the door, someone must answer. The Swedish government lectures us on the rule of law while their own cities burn with violence, bombings, and underage perpetrators. Instead of fixing their mess, they spend their time picking on us. Here, we’ve found better ways to use our time: 0 illegals, 0 bombings.
Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has accused Orbán of spreading “lies” about Sweden, but the Hungarian leader’s words strike a chord with critics who see Sweden as Europe’s cautionary tale—a country struggling to restore order after years of unchecked gang crime and spiralling violence.
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