Swedish gangs target Israeli interests

The 13-year-old boy should have been at school last Thursday, instead of staying at the police station in central Gothenburg. But police say he opened fire outside the offices of Israeli technology company Elbit Systems.

“He was caught in the act,” said police spokesman August Brandt, who said the guns were being investigated as “a case of attempted murder and weapons”.

Kalleback on the outskirts of Gothenburg is a sleepy residential area with a market development, a supermarket and a few offices.

No one was injured and little is known about why a child might open fire on a quiet Thursday morning, except for an Israeli company that sells security and safety solutions in the country.

But this was not an isolated incident. Actually there are more this year.

Earlier this month, Israeli embassies were targeted in neighboring Sweden and Denmark.

First there was a shootout outside the Israeli embassy in Stockholm, then two young Swedes aged 16 and 19 were arrested in Copenhagen after hand grenades were detonated near the embassy.

No one was injured, but Sweden’s security agency, Sapo, said Iran may have been involved in both. Sapo’s head of operations, Fredrik Hallstrom, said Tehran’s involvement was “a fictitious purpose”.

In recent months, Sapo has accused Iran of recruiting members of a Swedish gang to attack Israeli or Jewish interests.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry has condemned the allegations as “baseless and biased” and based on what it called false information from Israel.

Most of the suspects were teenagers, and some were 13 and 14 years old.

“In order to understand why we see Swedish youths attacking Israeli companies and embassies, we must first admit that we have had a gang conflict here in Sweden for a long time,” said Diamant Salihu, a journalist who investigates crime with Swedish television station SVT. .

One of Sweden’s most violent gangs, known as Foxtrot, has brought a wave of violence to the streets of Sweden, often involving young people tasked with committing crimes ranging from shooting rivals, detonating explosives to contract killings.

That happened in 2023 when the leader of the Foxtrot gang Rawa Majid got into a deadly conflict with Ismail Abdo, his former friend who was the leader of the gang known as Rumba.

When Abdo’s mother was killed in her home in Uppsala, north of Stockholm, in September last year, it opened a dark, violent chapter in Sweden’s ongoing gang warfare.

The two who were 15 and 19 at the time were found to be the ones who committed the incident.

Majid fled abroad facing an international arrest warrant, an Interpol red notice and a growing list of enemies.

Born in Iran to Iraqi Kurdish parents, he moved to Sweden with his family when he was young.

He moved from Sweden to Turkey in 2018 and moved to Iran last year.

Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad suspects that Majid has been working with Iran for months. He blamed his groups and Abdo for the latest attack.

When intelligence chief Daniel Stenling said Sapo “can confirm now that criminal networks in Sweden are proxies used by Iran,” Iran summoned a senior Swedish official to Tehran to protest.

Sweden also demanded the arrest of Majid’s rival, Ismail Abdo, who was arrested in Turkey last May but was reportedly released on bail.

Journalist Diamant Salihu says Tehran wanted to persuade the gang to “commit crimes against the government,” although Abdo’s group denies any involvement with Iran.

While gangs themselves may be suppressed by the outside world, that may not be the case for the youth caught up in Sweden’s wider gang crime problem.

An estimated 14,000 people in Sweden are caught up in gangs, according to this year’s police reportand another 48,000 people are said to be connected to them.

“Today’s 13- and 14-year-olds who commit these heinous crimes were three or four years old 10 years ago,” Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson told a televised debate of party leaders on public television last weekend.

The debate has turned into a blame game between the current centre-right coalition and its centre-left predecessors.

Social Democrat former Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson called for “a completely new approach” but Kristersson said that “a very large extent of this is a problem of integration and poor integration; and the integration problem is built on many immigrants”.

A limited number of gang members are men from immigrant backgrounds, but this has changed, so much so that Diamant Salihu says young people and adults from Swedish backgrounds are increasingly involved.

Criminology expert David Sausdal from Lund University, in southern Sweden, says it is becoming increasingly difficult to monitor networks as they become more fragmented on the internet, drawing people into the “criminal economy”.

“The people involved in it are just hired guns, paid for a job. They deliver a pizza or a hand grenade the right way.

“They are not very good at it, they are not motivated by internal hatred or conflicts. They are just doing a job.”

It’s that kind of change in Swedish society that worries police and politicians alike.

Justice Minister Gunnar Strommer spoke of three common threats to Sweden’s security – terrorists, state actors and organized crime.

But recent gang attacks, in the words of David Sausdal, contradict the common understanding of what has created serious crime in the past.