Three explosions rocked the Swedish capital of Stockholm over just a four-day period as the country is coming off a record year for gang-related bombings.
After a few months of relative calm, gang wars in the Nordic nation once again appear to be on the rise, as three explosions at residential buildings in Stockholm have been seen since Friday when a large blast went off at an apartment in Sundbyberg where a man with ties to a criminal gang lives.
This was followed by an explosion on Saturday outside a hair salon in the industrial area of Vällingby. Finally, on Monday, an apparent bomb went off at the gate of an apartment block in the Haninge area of the Swedish capital.
“We are investigating possible connections between the explosions, but that cannot be confirmed,” police spokeswoman Anna Westberg said per Aftonbladet.
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – FEBRUARY 02: General view damaged caused to a block of flats after a gang-related bomb exploded early in the morning on February 02, 2024 in Sundbyberg, Sweden. Sweden has recently been in the grip of a bloody conflict between gangs fighting over arms and drug trafficking. (Photo by Linnea Rheborg/Getty Images)
The explosions in Stockholm came as two more apparent bombings occurred in the Gävleborg area of the country to the north of the capital.
According to a report from public broadcaster SVT, at least four of the explosions are believed to be tied to the ongoing internal conflicts within the Foxtrot gang of notorious Iranian-born criminal Rawa Majid, known as the “Kurdish Fox”, who is currently believed to running the gang in Sweden from a hideout in Turkey.
The police believe that the explosions are tied to gang activity given that several of the addresses were known homes of people either directly involved in gangs or the relatives of gang members.
The latest string of explosions comes on the backs of a historic year for gang-tied bombings in Sweden, with 149 bombings being recorded in 2023, a new grim record for the once peaceful nation. This comes despite efforts from police, who seized an astonishing ten tonnes of explosive material from criminals during the same time period.
“We have never seen anything like this,” Malin Nygren of the National Bomb Data Center said last month.
Since the police began keeping such statistics in 2018, there have been at least 650 recorded bombings in Sweden.
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson whose centre-right government came to power in late 2022 on an anti-mass migration platform has blamed the country’s gang epidemic on the open borders agenda of previous left-wing governments.
“It is an irresponsible immigration policy and a failed integration that has brought us here,” Kristersson said in September.
From 2015 to 2022, Sweden was radically transformed by the European Migrant Crisis, which saw the country take in so many migrants that now one-fifth of the country are foreigners.
While the ethnicity of criminals is not recorded or published in Sweden, however, the head of intelligence for the Swedish Police, Linda Straaf admitted that many of the gang members are “second or third-generation immigrants”.