Two bombings rocked apartment buildings in Stockholm, Sweden, in the morning hours of Monday, January 2nd. Public broadcasting station SVT reports:
On Monday morning an explosion happened in an apartment building in Vällingby, in western Stockholm. According to SVT sources, a well-known rap artist is among the four arrested for the bombing. Another explosion happened early in the morning in Bagarmossen in southern Stockholm. In all, five people have been arrested.
According to videos from one of the buildings, included in another story from the SVT, the entrance is destroyed, doorways and windows are broken, and apartments higher up in the house have received varying degrees of damage.
The two bombings coincide with a shooting in the same western part of the city on Saturday night, leaving one person dead and two hospitalized. It was only the latest in a series of shootings and bombings over the past week, with one person shot to death in Rinkeby in northwest Stockholm on December 25th; a bombing of an apartment building in Enskededalen in southern Stockholm on the 27th; two shootings and a bombing on the 28th in Farsta, just south of Enskededalen, and another bombing in nearby Rågsved on New Year’s Eve.
Daily newspaper Aftonbladet reports that the wave of violence is related to a drug turf war, and to acts of vengeance for the assassination of rapper Einar in October 2021.
In another recent attack, in the southern suburb of Gubbängen, two teenagers aged 14 and 15 were arrested after having opened fire on an apartment door with fully automatic rifles. Police commander Max Åkerwall, quoted by the daily newspaper Expressen, explains:
Previously, they were maybe 20-25 when they committed these types of crimes. Now we see them [at] 14-17 years old.
In an interview with the newspaper, Marie Torstensson Levander, professor of criminology at Malmö University, criticizes current policies on crime and the rule of law. Politicians, she says, “do not take the problem seriously enough.”
