A 20-year-old man was killed and a 22-year-old seriously wounded after being shot in the heavily migrant-populated Swedish city of Malmö on Thursday evening.
Police arrested a 28-year-old man on Friday in connection with the shooting, believed to be linked to drug trafficking and a surge of gang violence across the country Sydsvenskan reports.
An eyewitness to the attack said, “I stood outside and smoked when I heard shooting. There were about four shots. Only two and then two more.”
“I have two small children going to the kindergarten nearby. And that’s not the first time someone got shot here,” they added.
The 20-year-old who was killed had been shot twice before according to police who say he had been wounded in July when he was struck in the lower body several times. The young man wore a bulletproof vest at the time which authorities say saved him from more life-threatening injuries. He was also shot in 2016.
Both of the victims were well-known to police as being part of the drug trafficking scene and were both gang members. The 22-year-old who survived the attack is also thought to have been involved in a murder that took place in February of last year that saw a prominent gang member murdered in his car.
Over the last nine years, deadly shootings have doubled according to statistics from the National Board of Sweden’s Cause of Death register. Gang violence in heavily migrant populated no-go areas has led to some police unable to fully operate and in the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby the violence has prevented construction work on a new police station in the area.
A study from September of this year noted that Swedish gun crime is now four to five times that of Germany and attacks with hand grenades are on the same level as Mexico.
The Swedish government has proposed to tackle the grenade attack situation, which has increased 550 per cent in just three years, by proposing a three-month amnesty next year allowing criminals to hand in grenades to the police.