A local who works in the Stockholm no-go suburb of Tensta has said the area has begun to resemble the “Wild West” due to the continued number of shootings taking place.
Haval, a hairdresser who works in Tensta, said he was working just 650 feet from the latest shooting in the area on Tuesday.
According to the hairdresser, the area has become like the “Wild West” and he has been forced to close his hairdressing salon several times due to shootings, Swedish broadcaster SVT reports.
As of September 7th, there have been a total of 70 confirmed shootings in the county of Stockholm and 19 people have died as a result of the shootings, significantly more than both 2020 and 2019.
Luís Castillo, another local of Stockholm’s no-go suburbs, said the area he has lived in for the last 20 years has been largely taken over by criminals.
“It’s not news to us that they shoot – it’s part of everyday life. There’s one shooting a week here. The authorities have abandoned us and made way for robbers and drug dealers,” he told SVT.
The shooting earlier this week in Tensta saw a man shot multiple times at around 5 p.m. on Tuesday evening near a local swimming pool. Police managed to arrest the man believed to have carried out the shooting and remarked that he was quite young.
The shooting this week comes just a month after two men in their twenties were shot dead in Tensta on August 16th.
Just a week prior, on August 10th, another shooting took place in the area, but no one was injured during that incident.
Fatal shootings in Sweden have been on an upward trend for a number of years and have resulted in Sweden Sweden one of the countries in the European Union with the most fatal shootings per capita.
Investigator Klara Hradilova-Selin of the Swedish Crime Prevention Council Brå commented on the increase saying: “The increase reported by Sweden cannot be seen anywhere else in Europe. Sweden has moved from the bottom to the top in Europe’s statistics.”
Men aged 20 to 29 are the most involved in fatal shootings and, according to statistics, almost all lived in no-go “vulnerable areas” and came from a migration background.