Swedish police chief Sven Holgersson, who serves as area manager of the city of Helsingborg, has claimed that as many as 98 per cent of the bombings in the city are linked to drug trafficking.
Helsingborg has seen an average of one explosion per week from September of last year until February of 2020, and while the number of bombings has decreased since February, police are still finding problems with investigating and prosecuting those behind the bombings.
“I say that 98 per cent of the explosions are due to drugs and money. You start trading drugs and you owe money. If you don’t pay, it blows up,” Holgersson told Swedish broadcaster SVT earlier this week.
Helsingborg also saw one of the largest explosions in recent years in Sweden when a police station in the city was targetted with a bomb that caused destruction to the facade of the building in 2017.
The attack was labelled an attack on democracy by Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven at the time. “The bombing of a police station in Helsingborg is extremely serious. An attack on the police is, in the long run, an attack on our democracy,” he said.
Helsinborg is not the only city to see bombings and explosions recently. This week in the county of Jönköping, three men were arrested with one of the men not only having links to criminal gangs but was also found in possession of explosive material.
Last year, Ylva Ehrlin, an analyst at Sweden’s National Bomb Guard, spoke out about the wave of explosions saying, “We have ten million people in Sweden, but I have not found any equivalent of this level of explosions in any industrialised country.”
“What is dangerous is that the user of the explosives probably does not possess the knowledge of how dangerous they are and how sensitive the substances are,” she said.
In 2019, Sweden saw a total of at least 236 explosions and bombings, up from 163 incidents in 2018.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.