To show me just how bad gang crime has become in Sweden, all journalist Diamant Salihu has to do is forward a few mobile phone messages. At first glance, they look like spam, written in garish fonts and promising large sums of money, there to be earned. It’s only on closer examination that the purpose of the pistol and skull emojis becomes clear. These are so-called “murder ads” – posted online by gang leaders, offering bounties to anyone willing to carry out the hits.
“All types of jobs are available,” reads one, promising up to one million krona (£78,000). “Age doesn’t matter”, adds another – explaining why many of Sweden’s new contract killers aren’t hardened hitmen, but children. Part of the problem, some say, is that Swedish law dictates anyone aged under 15 is too young to be prosecuted.
“We have so many child soldiers that nobody can count anymore,” sighs Salihu, an investigative reporter for SVT, Sweden’s answer to the BBC. “There are kids as young as 13 being arrested.”
Barely a week passes in Sweden today without a teenager being arrested for such a hit, keeping Salihu extremely busy, and the public in the grip of a national crisis like no other before it. A softly-spoken former tabloid journalist, the 41-year-old could be a character from a Scandi-noir novel, shining light in society’s darker corners. The body count on his beat, though, is far higher than any Stieg Larsson novel, and holds out little prospect of a satisfactory ending. For the story he has pursued for the last decade is, in effect, one giant, unsolved murder mystery: why has Sweden, long the envy of the rest of Europe for its peace and prosperity, suddenly seeing so many gangland killings? Why, in a land that prides itself on welcoming migrants, are so many gang members from migrant communities? And is it Swedish society that is the ultimate culprit, or the migrant communities themselves?
A social media post advertising a contract killing for one million Swedish Krone (£78k)
They are questions he has already addressed in two best-selling books of reportage, both kicking a hornet’s nest that liberal Sweden long preferred to leave well alone. His first, Until Everyone Dies, chronicled a war between two Somali street gangs that left nine young footsoldiers dead. His latest, When Nobody’s Listening, charts the upper echelons of Swedish crime, as revealed through the police cracking of Encrochat, the encrypted mobile phone service used by gangsters Europe-wide. It is published in translation this month in Britain – a place where Salihu, himself a migrant of Kosovan stock, first observed cracks in the multi-cultural model while working as a foreign correspondent for the Swedish tabloid Expressen.
During the six months he spent reporting for the newspaper in London, he covered the aftermath of the 2011 riots, in which gangs played a significant role. Two years later, he found himself reporting the same story at home, when riots in broke out in inner-city neighbourhoods across Sweden. Interviewing local youths, Salihu heard the standard complaints about joblessness and alienation, but couldn’t help asking himself one awkward question.
“In the Swedish areas that have social problems, I didn’t see the same bad standard of housing and class differences that I saw in the UK,” he tells me by Zoom from Sweden. “So why, when we in Sweden have a generally better standard of living, do we have this escalation of violence?”
It is a question that the rest of Sweden’s 10 million citizens are now asking too, in the wake of a decade-long surge of violence that peaked at 62 deadly shootings in 2022. That was twice the figure for England and Wales, which have six times the population, and ranked Sweden second only to Albania that year for gun deaths per capita in Europe.
Ageing biker clans that were once Sweden’s best-known street gangs have been supplanted by ethnic mafias from the Balkans and Middle East – most notably the Kurdish-led Foxtrot group, which looms large in Salihu’s new book. Foxtrot is prominent in Sweden’s drug trade, although much of its activity might more aptly be termed “disorganised crime”. It pioneered the online bounty system, lending out guns and grenades to any teenager seeking to make a name. With police struggling to keep up, even small provincial towns have witnessed shootings and bombings.
Gang kingpins, meanwhile, are eulogised by rappers and so-called “gangfluencers”, a term that made the Swedish Language Council’s list of new words back in 2021. As Ulf Kristersson, the country’s centre-Right prime minister, laments: “Sweden has never seen anything like it before.”
Nor, Salihu adds, is it just youngsters from migrant “ghettoes” claiming the bounties. “We also now see Swedish kids involved – some from broken backgrounds, but some whose parents are successful. All they’ve maybe done before is steal something or play truant, now they’re getting involved in murder.”
A video obtained by The Telegraph late last year showed what appeared to be a 14-year-old assassin carrying out a contract killing for a narcotics gang. The footage shows the teen, armed with a Kalashnikov rifle, firing a spray of bullets towards the front door of a property within an apartment block. It was said to have been filmed to prove the killing was carried out.
So what has gone wrong? Part of the blame, Salihu says, is down to the social blights common to most of Europe’s more impoverished multi-racial neighbourhoods. Joblessness and discrimination limit many youngsters’ sense of prospects. TV gang dramas, meanwhile, often “highlight the flashy parts of gang life – money, respect, power – but leave out the trauma, manipulation, and tragic consequences.”
Yet the sense of failure is all the more acute in Sweden, long an open door compared to other European nations. Ever since the 1960s, when it first styled itself as a humanitarian superpower, it has taken in those fleeing trouble abroad, be it Americans fleeing the Vietnam war draft, Soviet dissidents, or Iraqis fleeing Saddam Hussein’s regime. In the 1990s came refugees from the Balkans, and in the last decade asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa have arrived. Anxious not to create “parallel societies”, Swedish governments have long funded social integration programmes alongside the waves of migration.
On the subject of the deadly rise of gang crime, Ulf Kristersson, the country’s centre-Right prime minister has said that ‘Sweden has never seen anything like it before’ – Getty
But parallel societies have sprung up regardless, according to Salihu, who lived until the age of eight on his family’s farm in Kosovo, where even cars were a luxury.
“We had a horse and cart, like in the Borat movies,” he says. The family fled ahead of the war with Serbia in 1998, which saw their home burned down, settling in a provincial town in central Sweden.
“I remember my mother breaking down in tears when she learned that her brother had been killed while fighting in the war,” Salihu recalls. “I’ve always felt that if I’d stayed in Kosovo, I might not be alive today.”
Even back then, about 20 per cent of his new Swedish classmates were migrants like him. But he also mixed with kids whose parents had college educations and second homes – a vision of the Swedish dream to aspire to. Today, he says, his old neighbourhood no longer even glimpses that dream.
“I went back there in 2014 as a journalist, and basically every kid in the school was now from a migrant background,” he says. “That makes it harder for them to learn Swedish properly, and they won’t see what I saw as a child. Society has become much more segregated. Swedes welcome people from every corner of the world, but don’t actually want to live with them as neighbours.”
Salihu doesn’t blame it all on racism, however. In his new book, for example, he writes of gang-plagued areas where single mothers are often raising eight children alone. Many gang members he interviews, meanwhile, don’t blame society or their parents, but “actively choose their lifestyle”.
“They’ve had all the opportunities, with siblings who’ve graduated and got good jobs, yet still they’ve chosen the bad path.”
The “bad path”, unfortunately, is open to anyone who chooses to answer a murder ad. Recruits are sometimes directed to their targets via live smart-phone feeds, and then ordered to film their handiwork. Last December, a killer using Go Pro footage filmed himself gunning down a Syrian-born rapper, Ninos Khouri, in a multi-storey car-park.
Gang leaders also cultivate cult presences on social media, their followers often taking exception to less-than-flattering coverage by journalists like Salihu. When one former Foxtrot affiliate, Mustapha al-Jubouri, broadcast a video revealing he had faked his own death – waving a golden Kalashnikov around to prove he was still alive – his acolytes singled out Salihu for criticism on a live Instagram feed. “It was being watched by 20,000 people,” says Salihu, who keeps his home address secret. “How could Instagram not do something about that, knowing what kind of people are involved, inciting murder and threatening journalists?”
Sweden’s gang menace is also spreading overseas, including to Britain. In 2022, Anis Hemissi, a kickboxer of Tunisian descent, was jailed in the UK for murdering Flamur Beqiri, a Swedish-Albanian drug kingpin gunned down outside his home in Battersea. Swedish police are also hunting a 25-year-old gangster suspected of murdering two British travel agents, Juan Cifuentes and Farooq Abdulrazak, shot dead during a business trip to the city of Malmö last July. Their families insist they had no gang connections.
To complicate matters, many gangsters also have bolt-holes in the Middle East, where family connections sometimes shield them from arrest. Al-Jubouri issued his “comeback” video from Iraq, while Foxtrot’s leader, Rawa “The Fox” Majid, fled to Turkey six years ago, taking citizenship to avoid extradition. He reportedly owned a luxury flat in Istanbul, from where he continued to wage gang feuds remotely before then apparently fleeing to Iran.
With the far-Right, anti-immigrant Swedish Democrats now attracting one in five of Swedish voters, the government has been trying to push back on the gang problem. Jail terms have been increased significantly for juveniles, who used to get away with as little as three years’ custody for murder. Thanks to the cracking of Encrochat – which let police forces all over Europe eavesdrop on gangsters’ plans – around 400 Swedish criminals have been jailed. Swedish politicians are also calling for curbs on social media use to stop the “murder ads” – something Salihu warns could also spread to the UK. “You too may end up with British child soldiers, just as we are facing this crisis in Sweden,” he says. He points out that while Britain’s tougher firearms laws mean shootings are less frequent, knife crime is almost as bad: in the 12 months to March 2024, 57 under-25s died in stabbings, 17 of them under 16.
But while Sweden’s gun killings have now dipped – last year saw 45 – Salihu fears the underlying cause for the violence continues to lurk. He also points out that the gang footsoldiers are now attracting far more dangerous paymasters than common criminals. A year ago, Swedish officials accused Iran of recruiting local gang members for attacks on Israeli interests in Europe, including Israel’s Stockholm Embassy, where a live grenade was found in the grounds.
Last month, Washington sanctioned the Foxtrot network over the attacks, saying The Fox had “specifically cooperated” with Tehran. With that in mind, Salihu fears it may one day not just be gangsters who live in fear of being targeted by “murder ads”.
“If we allow these criminals to become more powerful, I fear that our democratic institutions will come under pressure, be it prosecutors, or journalists – I myself would feel much more afraid,” Salihu adds. “These guys are predators. You have to stand up to them, not back off.”
When Nobody’s Listening: Inside Sweden’s Drug Gangs, is published by Polity Press, and available for purchase (£25.00) from April 18
