Figures from the Swedish police’s National Operations Department (NOA) have revealed that foreign gangs are behind 90 per cent of the car thefts in the country.
The report also notes that foreign gangs are responsible for the majority of thefts of other machinery including car parts, boat engines, and agricultural machines ,and that the stolen goods are often quickly shipped outside of Sweden, Sveriges Radio reports.
While the Swedish customs administration is particularly vigilant with inspecting vehicles coming into Sweden, the agency has been seen to be much more lax with vehicles exiting the country, spending just two per cent of their time looking at outgoing vehicles.
According to the radio broadcaster, Swedish law makes it so that it is not illegal to remove stolen items from the country, making it difficult, if not impossible, for the customs administration to detain and arrest those smuggling goods out of Sweden.
Foreign gangs are also said to be behind nearly half of all home burglaries as well, according to the NOA statistics.
The report comes only weeks after police in Stockholm warned about the growth of the brutal Nigerian mafia known as the Black Ax in the Swedish capital.
Primarily specialising in drug smuggling and prostitution, police arrested members of the Nigerian mafia in Gothenburg in October, with investigators also finding $11,647,775/£9,467,375 worth of drugs including heroin and cocaine.
In 2017, Swedish newspaper Expressen noted that 94.5 per cent of Stockholm’s identified gang members were from migration backgrounds, with 40.6 per cent of them being born overseas.
Foreign-born residents or those from migration backgrounds are also heavily overrepresented in sex crime convictions, according to a report from SVT in 2018.
The broadcaster claimed that in their analysis of 843 cases, 58 per cent of the men convicted of rape and attempted rape were born in another country.
The figures were even higher in cases of assault rape, in which the victim did not know their attacker, with more than eight in ten convicts being foreign-born.