Foreign Affairs

Sweden Cracks Down On Deadly Teen Hitmen Epidemic Despite Liberal Outcry

Johan Fredriksson, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Violent crimes rates declined rapidly after Swedish police were given greater authority to crackdown on criminal organizations who recruit children to become hitmen despite liberal outcries against the measures.

Middle Eastern drug syndicates in Sweden recruited children as young as 12 years old through social media to carry out assassinations against rival gang members causing a massive peak in gun violence in 2022, the Telegraph reported. The Swedish government granted new enforcement powers to the police in 2024 that civil liberty campaigners condemned and the United Nations called “repugnant and illegal,” according to the outlet.

Despite this, the Swedish government saw 147 shootings in 2025, a 63% decline compared to the peak of 390 in 2022, per the outlet. Murder and manslaughter hit their lowest rate in almost a decade even though Sweden recently had the second-highest gun related deaths in the entire European Union (EU).

The greatest enforcement asset the Swedish police were able to use was creating safe zones in areas considered high risk to shootings or explosions, according to the Telegraph. This allows allow the law enforcement to perform searches on vehicles and people, including children, without needing suspicion of a crime.

Swedish police can, under their new authority, surveil the phones and internet of children under 15 if they are suspected of being involved in serious criminal activity, the outlet reported. Furthermore, police are now also able to pick out children through clues that suggest they are involved in gang activities, such as wearing certain clothing brands, according to the Telegraph.

Civil rights campaigners decried these measures as racial profiling due to the fact most safe zones targeted heavily migrant populated neighborhoods, per the outlet. Swedish police focused on these neighborhoods because migrant youth were the target demographic for gangs like the Foxtrot Network.

Carin Götblad, a Stockholm police chief, told the Telegraph in an interview that many of the foreign born population responded positively to the new police measures.

“They wanted to have them, because they were scared and they trusted the police to use them [the new enforcement powers],” Götblad told the outlet. “They didn’t feel they were being discriminated against, it was those from a Swedish background who were not so positive about it.”

The Foxtrot Network, a Sweden-based criminal organization, specifically targeted children under 15 to carry out hit jobs, knowing they could not be criminally prosecuted by Swedish law to dissuade gangs from using children, according to the Telegraph. Because of this, the Swedish government changed the law to lower the age of responsibility from 15 to 13 for serious crimes.

The U.S. sanctioned the Foxtrot Network in March 2025 for its attempted attack on the Israeli embassy in Stockholm and alleged the Foxtrot leader, Rawa Majid, cooperated with Iranian intelligence.