Police are treating the case of two men who were shot in the Stockholm suburb of Kista and later succumbed to their injuries as a murder investigation.
Authorities received a call from the area at 10:06 pm Wednesday evening saying that two men were injured in a car and appeared to have been the victims of a shooting. Stockholm police spokesman Anna Westberg confirmed “the caller mentioned that another car disappeared at high speed”, leading investigators to treat the case as a murder, Swedish broadcaster SVT reports.
Police say the attackers had fled the scene long before they arrived and were unable to identify the perpetrators. Stockholm police spokesman Carina Skagerlind confirmed the victims had died at a nearby hospital at around 4 am Thursday morning, saying: “The two men in their 20s are dead and their families have been informed.”
The killings are not the first in recent months in Stockholm as police arrested a man in January who is said to have shot a 25-year-old who was driving to the hospital. The 25-year-old had already been shot once and was going to the hospital to seek treatment when the unidentified man ran him off the road and fatally shot him in the head.
Police have not ruled out possible connections between the murders, according to Ms. Skagerlind. Authorities have employed dogs and a helicopter to try and find leads, but so far no suspect or leads that been identified in the double murder.
Fatal shootings in Sweden have doubled over the last nine years according to statistics from the National Board of Sweden. Shootings are not Sweden’s only problem as a spate of grenade attacks have been ongoing in Stockholm and the heavily migrant-populated city of Malmö near the Danish border.
In the past several weeks, police found two live hand grenades in both Malmö and Stockholm. In Malmö, the grenade was discovered in a park while police were searching for a weapon linked to the shooting of a man in the area. In Stockholm, the grenade was found in a rubbish bin within proximity to a police station.
Grenades and automatic weapons are typically smuggled into Sweden through the Balkan states, often by gang members of a migrant background. In March of last year three men, a Turk, a Swede, and a Serbian were arrested on the Slovenian border attempting to smuggle 59 hand grenades, five automatic rifles, and many rounds of ammunition.
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson@breitbart.com
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