How Swedish gangs are exporting young contract killers across Scandinavia

When the Oresund Bridge across the strait between Denmark and Sweden opened in 2000 it was hailed as a symbol of Nordic harmony and the gradual evaporation of Europe’s internal borders.
It spawned an immensely popular crime drama, The Bridge, in which the icy Swedish detective Saga Noren and Martin Rohde, her more emotionally intelligent Danish counterpart, combine the stronger points of their respective national stereotypes.
Yet even Noren and Rohde might struggle with the wave of criminality that is currently rolling south over the strait.
Sweden is accused of exporting its gang violence problem to its Nordic neighbours after at least 25 young Swedes on suspected contract-killing or bombing missions were arrested in Denmark over the past four months.
Denmark has imposed controls on the Swedish border, with a particular focus on the Oresund Bridge, and Norway has said Swedish gangs are now operating in every single Norwegian district.
Peter Hummelgaard, the Danish justice minister, said Sweden’s neighbours were suffering the “consequences of [its] longstanding failed immigration and criminal justice policy”. Emilie Enger Mehl, his Norwegian opposite number, agreed, albeit in slightly more diplomatic language.
Part of the problem, according to Markus Kaakinen, a criminologist at the University of Helsinki, is that Sweden’s notoriously trigger-happy drug gangs are outgrowing their home market. As a result they are not only setting up distribution outposts in countries such as Norway and Finland but are also moving in on “transit” states that serve as conduits for the international drug trade, such as Denmark and Spain, where they compete with the local criminal networks.
In the Danish case, these are often classic biker or “rocker” gangs, although there are also younger outfits such as the now-banned Loyal to Familia group.
Yet that is not the main thing that bothers experts. What really worries them is a previously unknown phenomenon: Swedish youths are being anonymously hired through social media for acts of violence in Denmark, as though they were Deliveroo drivers.
“This is something very new: the recruiting of very young, completely unknown adolescents,” Kaakinen said. “There’s increasing demand for violence and these gangs have noticed that it’s less risky for them to use these channels.”
Typically these teenage boys or men in their twenties are recruited on encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram and paid the equivalent of between £20,000 and £60,000 for a hit, without even necessarily knowing who has commissioned it.
Bombings with hand grenades or improvised explosives, which are usually intended as warnings rather than murder attempts, go for as little as £5,000.
An investigation by DR, the Danish public broadcaster, found the jobs were doled out so casually that the recruiters had developed their own emoji shorthand: a water pistol for a killing, an apple for a grenade.
“It’s the gig-ification of gang crime,” said David Sausdal, a sociologist and criminologist at Lund University who himself commutes across the Oresund between Copenhagen and southern Sweden, the same route taken by most of the hitmen.
“What is interesting and alarming is that these are not just your regular gang criminals. They aren’t even necessarily associated with gangs. There are examples of them coming from middle-class homes. It isn’t the old-school recruitment through friends or networks; it’s much more chaotic and random … and that makes the task of the police a lot more difficult.”
The Swedish authorities are already having a hard enough time getting a grip on their country’s conventional gang wars, where kingpins with nicknames such as the “Kurdish Fox”, “The Strawberry” and “The Greek” pursue their vendettas through teenage amateur assassins hired on a semi-freelance basis.
Denmark’s political leaders argue that their country is now exposed to the effects of a generational failure of governance on Sweden’s part.
Their diagnosis is that a generous set of asylum policies and an enthusiasm for multiculturalism, combined with poor urban planning and an increasingly threadbare welfare state, led to the emergence of “exposed areas” that were not seriously addressed until the past few years.
These city districts, characterised by high levels of crime and benefits dependency, and low levels of income and educational attainment, function as reservoirs for gang recruiters.
Danish ministers feel their state has dealt relatively well with its own problems along similar lines. There are estimated to be about 1,500 active gang members in a population of 5.9 million, while Sweden has roughly 14,000 in a population of 10.5 million.
The Swedish centre-right coalition government, which has been propped up from the outside by the hard-right Sweden Democrats party, has pledged tougher integration, policing and sentencing measures.
After a meeting between the two countries’ justice ministers in Copenhagen this week, there will also be a joint police operation, with Swedish officers posted to the Danish capital.
Denmark wants to go further. It is controversially using artificial intelligence-driven facial recognition software on CCTV footage in an attempt to retrace the steps of the Swedish offenders. Hummelgaard has even said he would like to ban Telegram and TikTok in his country.
However, criminologists argue that only a broader approach that takes in gang crime prevention can resolve the problem in the long term.
It remains unclear whether Sweden’s issues could spill over beyond the Nordic states, particularly after two businessmen from north London were found shot dead in a burnt-out car in the southern Swedish port city of Malmo last month.
Sausdal said he doubted that Swedish hitmen would routinely appear on the streets of Manchester or Hamburg, but if the gangs were left unchecked they might yet provide a template for copycat activity in the UK and other countries.