Twenty-three bystanders have been killed and 30 others injured in gang-related shootings in Sweden over the past three years, according to new police figures that highlight the scale of the country’s organized crime crisis.
The victims include people struck by stray bullets, individuals shot in cases of mistaken identity, and relatives of gang members caught in the crossfire, according to reporting by AFP.
Swedish police say the rising number of collateral victims is partly linked to the growing exploitation of very young and inexperienced shooters by criminal networks.
“We are dealing with very young perpetrators who, in many cases, have no prior experience of violent crime, which increases the risk that third parties or the wrong target will be hit,” Alexander Wallenius, an operations coordinator within the Swedish police, told the Swedish news agency TT.
Sweden was once regarded as one of Europe’s safest countries, but it has spent years battling a surge in shootings and bombings linked to rival gangs, many of them fighting over the drug trade.
Criminal networks have increasingly used social media and encrypted messaging apps to recruit teenagers as contract killers. Some are under the age of 15, meaning they are below the age of criminal responsibility in Sweden and cannot be prosecuted in the normal criminal justice system.
The government has responded with a series of tougher measures ahead of the Sept. 13 parliamentary elections, including a proposal to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 13 for serious offenses punishable by at least four years in prison.
But the crisis is no longer limited to shootings. Sweden has also seen kidnappings, grenade plots, welfare fraud, and organized criminal intimidation linked to the same gang networks. The two dozen homicide fatalities are just the tip of the iceberg of those affected by ongoing migrant gang wars.
In November last year, a Swedish court sentenced seven members of a Somali drug gang known as the Death Patrol over the abduction of a 22-year-old woman and her 2-year-old daughter, who were held for nearly four days over an unpaid drug debt.
The woman was kidnapped in Strängnäs while putting her daughter into a car seat. Several men pulled up behind her, forced her into a vehicle, and drove her and the child more than 400 kilometers to Gothenburg.
WATCH: 🇸🇪 A left-wing Swedish MP makes a swift exit when she is asked about her party's call for the forced mixing of Swedes and immigrants.
She runs away when asked which members of her party's leadership will be moving to Stockholm's migrant-dominated suburbs.
📹… pic.twitter.com/8T4MYenXKy
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) March 9, 2026The pair were then taken to a rented cabin outside Kungälv, where they were held for almost four days. During the ordeal, the woman was told her ex-boyfriend owed several million kronor to the migrant gang over a lost drug shipment to Norway, and that she and her child were being used as leverage to force repayment.
The same month, a Swedish government review found that thousands of people linked to gangs had been receiving income from the benefits system for years, giving criminal networks a steady, legitimate revenue stream.
Around 4,000 people known to police for gang affiliation had reportedly received sickness benefits, sick pay, or job-seeker support, with total payments estimated at 3.6 billion kronor, or around €327.5 million.
The findings mean Swedish taxpayers have, in effect, been helping fund the very criminal networks now terrorizing their communities, providing gang members with a state-backed safety net while they continue their illicit operations.
Despite the violence, some senior political figures have continued to downplay the scale of the crisis. Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt sparked criticism in December when he claimed Sweden had handled mass immigration “relatively well” and described gang crime as a “marginal phenomenon.”
“I still think that we have handled it relatively well in Sweden,” Bildt said in an interview with Göteborgs-Posten. “Something that we didn’t really foresee is this marginal phenomenon that is gang crime. A dominant marginal phenomenon, though. Shootings and such. We didn’t have that before. It has appeared on the margins of all this. We didn’t foresee that. At least, I didn’t.”
There have also been several near misses that could have dramatically increased the number of bystander casualties.
In February, a Swedish court found that a live hand grenade left in a stroller at a residential building in central Gothenburg could have caused mass casualties. The case, however, ended with only one person receiving a sentence because the suspected organizer was too young to be punished under Swedish criminal law.
The grenade incident was linked to a 15-year-old boy who traveled from Vänersborg to Gothenburg in August 2025 after allegedly being recruited through encrypted messaging platforms by criminal contacts who offered him money to carry out an attack.
