Foreign
SWEDEN’S long-running gang crime could bring a sad record to the Scandinavian EU country this year.
So far in 2022, a total of 47 people had been killed in shootings in the country – and police feared it would not stop there.
It looked like a record this year, the head of the Swedish National Police, Anders Thornberg, said in an interview with the TT news agency.
If things continued as they had been, this would mean that there would be more than 60 deaths in such incidents by the end of the year.
The situation was being shaped by the fact that more firearms were circulating on the streets and young offenders were making use of them to kill, Thornberg said.
For several years, Sweden has had an increasing problem with gang crime, which repeatedly resulted in shootings and explosions being set off.
Sometimes even non-participants got into the line of fire.
On Tuesday night, there were again two powerful detonations in blocks of flats in the southern Swedish cities of Åstorp and Helsingborg.
One man was seriously injured and treated in hospital after the explosion in Åstorp.
The issue of gang crime had also dominated the election campaign before the Swedish general election on Sept. 11, in which a conservative and right-wing four-party bloc won a narrow parliamentary majority.
The right-wing populist Sweden Democrats in particular benefited from the focus on crime, achieving a record result of 20.5 per cent.
This had made them the second strongest force in the Swedish parliament for the first time. (dpa/NAN)
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