Crisis in Sweden as ‘assassin’ children carry out contract killings | World | News
A crisis has erupted in Sweden after ‘assassin’ children as young as 11 are being recruited to carry out contract killings.
Gang-related killings have surged in Sweden in recent years – and police say it is children who are increasingly being recruited to carry out the hits.
Fernando aged just 14 is one among dozens of child contract killers in Sweden, recruited by gang middle-men on social media who offer them money in exchange for killing.
Gangs pay as much as 150,000 kroner (£13,000) per job to recruit youths often under 15 as they are too young to prosecute.
Fernando was playing his Fifa video game in his youth club when his orders arrived by text.
The young hitman for a Swedish narcotics gang casually collects two pistols, a Kalashnikov rifle and an accomplice and replies “Yeah, I understand brother,” before hurrying to their target in a suburb of Stockholm after receiving his orders.
The Telegraph reports seeing mobile phone footage, filmed by Fernando himself to prove he did the job.
Swedish police concluded an investigation of a year-old case in which an 11-year-old child exhibited his desire for murder, saying he “cannot wait for his first dead body,” on Instagram.
The findings of the investigation charged four men, aged 18 to 20, with recruiting minors aged 11 to 17, to work for a local gang. All suspects were arrested before the crimes could be committed.
While police exert efforts to mitigate the rates of criminal recruitment, such as deploying volunteers in disadvantaged neighbourhoods to warn youths, the problem remains heavily present across the country.
More recently the gangs, who post contracts on online message boards, have sought out girls and children with mental disabilities
The number of murder cases involving child suspects in Sweden, which has the highest per capita rate of gun violence in the EU, has exploded over the past year.
Illegal guns – largely from the Balkans, according to police – are relatively accessible in Sweden.
In the first six months of this year there were 42 people aged 15-17 suspected of attempted murder. This compares with 38 during the whole of 2022.
