Gang conflict in Sweden has claimed its youngest victim so far. A 13-year-old boy was found dead in a forest in the Swedish municipality of Haninge on Monday, September 11th. His death is said to be linked to Sweden’s ongoing gang conflicts which have exploded in scope as gang members and their families are now being targeted for assassination.
The body of the young teen was discovered in a wooded area near a railway track after he had been reported missing, according to a report from the newspaper Expressen, which also claims he had ties to criminal gang networks.
Prosecutor Lisa dos Santos put out a press release regarding the case:
What I can say is that we are dealing with an extremely serious suspicion of crime, which is that a very young person has been murdered. The fact that the murder victim was at such a young age is in itself absolutely terrible and shows another dimension of the merciless serious violence. Now we are working hard to investigate what happened to this boy.
The killing of the 13-year-old boy is not the first time a child linked to Sweden’s violent criminal gangs has been found dead in recent months. Over the summer, two 14-year-olds, Mohamed Suleiman and Layth Al-Azzawi, were both found dead in the Stockholm region
The two teens are believed to have resold pistols they had been able to procure from the notorious ‘Kurdish Fox’ gang, led by Rawa Majid, also known as the Kurdish Fox, who fled Sweden and is currently in hiding in Turkey. The two teens were likely then killed by the gang.
Despite attempts from the Swedish government to arrest the Iranian-born Kurdish Fox, Turkish officials have refused to extradite the alleged gang leader, who received a Turkish passport as part of an investment-for-citizenship scheme.
Throughout 2023, the Kurdish Fox and his network in Stockholm have been at war with the Dala network, led by a man simply known as The Greek, leading to shootings, killings, and bombings across parts of the Stockholm region. In the first 26 days of the year, the region saw 13 bombing attacks, or an average of one every two days.
While much of the violence has been gang members targeting rival gang members, the targeted attacks have also expanded to relatives and family members of known gang members.
On the morning of Tuesday, September 12th, a 25-year-old man was found dead in the city of Uppsala, likely having been killed by a gunshot wound. The incident took place in the stairwell of a building linked to a man in his 50s, a relative of the Kurdish Fox, who was the likely target of the killing. He was believed to have been involved in the Kurdish Fox’s criminal activities by holding money for the notorious gang leader.
Tuesday’s killing is the third murder in Uppsala in recent weeks, and soon after, a woman in her 60s, said to be linked to a rival of the Kurdish Fox, was killed. Another shooting last Sunday was reported, targeting the mother-in-law of the Kurdish Fox, but the shooter shot at the wrong residence.
Police Commander Christer Birgersson commented on the extent of the gang violence saying, “We have a serious development in society that has now reached an extent we have not seen before. The development of violence has escalated.”
Jale Poljarevius, head of police intelligence in the central region, was pessimistic about the near future commenting,
We suspect that there may be further shootings. Our work on intelligence is very complex. We have already made surveys where we see that we have a total of 1260 individuals who are part of various criminal networks in our region. Of these, 571 are located in Uppsala.
Poljarevius added that individuals who had no involvement in gang activity were being targeted simply because they were related to those who were, saying, “The result is that we have a very large group of individuals who are in need of protection.”
Gang violence has been a major problem in Sweden for years, as most fatal shootings in the country are linked to criminal gangs. Last year saw a record 62 fatal shootings and 391 shootings in total.
A 2021 report noted that Sweden has become the leading country in Europe for deadly violence involving firearms.
The vast majority of those involved in gang crime, much like the Kurdish Fox, come from migration backgrounds. A 2022 report claimed that 85% of the suspects involved in fatal shootings were either born abroad or had at least one foreign-born parent.
