By: V4 Agency
The head of police was responding to a recent national report that revealed a marked upward trend – on a scale unseen in the rest of Europe – of gun-related violent crimes. While in the early 2000s, the North European country was one of the safest in Europe, it has seen a steady increase in armed crimes since the mid-2010s, topping European statistics since 2018.
Eight in ten fatal shootings in Sweden are linked to criminal groups – mainly drug traffickers and organised crime gangs, writes US portal Breitbart based on the latest report of the Swedish National Crime Prevention Council. An article by SVT Nyheter, which also analysed the report, revealed that the victims of lethal shootings are mainly men aged 20 to 29, and that members of this age group have also produced the biggest increase in gun crime fatalities in Sweden. While in the rest of Europe, on average the number of men in this age bracket dying of gunfire is zero to four per one million, this figure is 18 in Sweden.
“The increase reported in Sweden cannot be seen anywhere else in Europe. The country has moved from the bottom to the top in Europe’s statistics,” said Klara Hradilova-Selin, investigator at the Swedish National Crime Prevention Council, while commenting on the report. The investigator pointed to the fact that Sweden was among the safest countries in Europe in the early 2000s. Since the mid-2010s, however, the country has seen a surge in the number of gun crimes, and since 2018, Sweden has taken the lead in this unflattering ranking in Europe.
Sweden saw a record-breaking high number of homicides last year, with ongoing gang wars in no-go zones….
Swedish police chief Erik Nord wrote an opinion piece for the Goteborgs-Posten on the issue. The head of police believes that there is a direct link between the increasing number of gun crimes and immigration.
“It is no longer a secret any more that there is a link between crimes involving guns and explosives and the migration Sweden has experienced in the past decade,” Nord wrote in his opinion piece in Goteborgs-Posten.
“I have the opportunity to follow these cases closely and it is clearly visible that almost everyone involved in these shootings is originally from the Balkans, the Middle East, North or East Africa,” Nord wrote in the article.
The top police officer noted that Germany has also seen a massive influx of immigrants since the 2015 migration crisis, but the rate of gun-related crimes is far lower than in Sweden. Nord attributed the difference to the fact that the number of police officers in the Nordic country as a percentage of the population is well below that of Germany’s.
In recent years, a number of reports have highlighted the link between violent crime in Sweden and mass migration. A report issued in February 2020 found that the majority of violent crime ring leaders are of immigrant origin. Another report in September 2019 had similar findings highlighting that the majority of armed crime suspects in the city of Malmo was of migrant background.