The BBC and news website Politico both released articles within the last week describing the pervasive problem of hand grenades in Sweden nearly three years after Breitbart London began covering the issue.
The left-leaning website Politico published an article entitled, “Sweden’s violent reality is undoing a peaceful self-image,” on Monday.
The article described the rising tide of violence in the country claiming that shootings had become common and the country was becoming more known for “Islamic State recruits, bombings and hand grenade attacks” than “popular music, IKEA and a generous welfare state”.
On Wednesday the BBC followed up with an article describing the prevalence, and accessibility, of hand grenades among organised criminal gangs in the heavily migrant populated suburbs of several of the country’s major cities. The broadcaster even quoted former head of Sweden’s paramedics’ union Henrik Johansson who described certain Stockholm suburbs as no-go zones.
The admission by the two mainstream media outlets follows a New York Times article which reported the existence of Sweden’s no-go zones, revelations that follow a long-held insistence among media and political elites that no go zones didn’t actually exist. The change of tune from senior figures including German Chancellor Angela Merkel shortly followed the release of Breitbart London editor in chief Raheem Kassam’s best-selling book, No Go Zones: How Sharia Law Is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You.
The Politico and BBC articles come almost three years after Breitbart London interviewed former Malmö Chief Superintendent Torsten Elofsson in September of 2015. Elofsson, who had worked as a police officer in the city for 42 years, said “Malmo is infamous for explosions. Yet thankfully nobody has been killed by the explosions yet – some of them are just used to frighten people.”
Since then, at least one person has died from hand grenade explosions in Sweden. A 60-year-old man was killed earlier this year after picking up a hand grenade at the Varby Gard subway station in Stockholm. The explosion also resulted in the injury of a 45-year-old woman.
Earlier this year, police officer Gunnar Appelgren claimed that hand grenades were easy to find and said: “In 2017, until the end of November, 22 hand grenades were found in Stockholm, of which 12 had exploded.”
“Some groups initially estimated that hand grenades are good for scaring or attacking another group. Then you are in a spiral, where hand grenades become part of the weapons used in these gang conflicts,” he added.
Bosnian prosecutor Goran Glamocanin later revealed that Sweden was the number one market in Europe for fully automatic weapons and hand grenades, which are said to originate in the Balkan region.
Gangs have used hand grenades against rivals, but in one case they were also used against police officers.
In Uppsala late last year, a man was arrested after being suspected of throwing a hand grenade at police vehicles. While no officers were killed or injured in the attack, several vehicles were damaged by the explosion.