A Swedish police officer has claimed that the gang members who shot dead a 12-year-old girl caught in their crossfire last weekend are also victims.
Martin Lazar, a police officer in the municipality of Botkyrka where the deadly shooting took place last weekend, said that he felt the incident was a failure of all parts of Swedish society.
“Many people now want to focus on the visible part of the iceberg – actions from people who lack empathy and morality. But these individuals are in fact victims,” he claimed in an opinion article for Swedish newspaper Expressen.
“They lacked the right conditions from day one of life, as violence was closer at hand than anything else. These people usually lack an honest relationship with their parents and have little or no community in their families,” he argued.
Many criminal gangs, particularly in the Stockholm region, are led by migration-background individuals, according to a report from Expressen released earlier this year.
On Monday, two migrant gangs came to blows in Borås, with at least one or more of the estimated 20 individuals armed with knives. Four people were injured and treated at a local hospital as a result of the brawl. It was believed to have been between one gang composed of Arabs and another gang composed of Somalians and Eritreans.
Police press spokesman Peter Adlersson commented on the incident, saying: “Some of them had received knife wounds. One had a cut to the face, another to their back.”
Gang warfare, which often involves shootings and bombings in Sweden, remains a major problem. Gang crime has not shown any signs of slowing down so far this year, despite the Wuhan virus pandemic.
Indeed, a report from April claimed that shootings in 2020 between January 1st and April 15th had actually increased compared to the previous year.