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CRIME

Swedish gangs turn to internet to recruit young members

Swedish gangs are widening the scope of their recruitment by contacting youths online, said police.

Published: 15 August 2024 14:21 CEST
Swedish gangs turn to internet to recruit young members
Johan Olsson, head of the Swedish police national operative department. Photo: Lars Schröder/TT

Several underage Swedes, in a few cases younger than 15, are suspected of being involved in a spate of violence in Sweden and Denmark.

Johan Olsson, head of the Swedish police national operative department (Noa), told a press conference that previously, gangs almost exclusively recruited youths in physical places in specific areas, but lately they have been turning to the internet to find new members.

“They’ve built up criminal brands and with the help of that, they turn to vulnerable youths in various chat forums and ask if anyone wants a job,” he said. They lure them in by giving them the freedom to choose what to do, for example fire a gun at a door or kill a person.

He said the new recruitment scheme happened “fairly suddenly” and appears to be unique to Sweden.

“I wouldn’t say we’re surprised, but we haven’t seen this anywhere else in Europe, so of course it’s a new phenomenon for us to handle.”

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CRIME

Sweden charges Islamic State woman in landmark trial

Swedish prosecutors said they have brought genocide charges against a woman in the country's first court case over crimes committed by the Islamic State group against the Yazidi minority.

Published: 20 September 2024 07:15 CEST
Sweden charges Islamic State woman in landmark trial

A prosecutor told AFP the 52-year-old woman was accused of keeping Yazidi women and children as slaves at her home in Syria between 2014 and 2016.

She was charged with “genocide, crimes against humanity and serious war crimes” on the grounds that her actions formed part of a broader campaign by the group (IS or Isis) against the Kurdish-speaking Yazidi minority.

The woman, who is a Swedish citizen, is in jail having already been sentenced by a Swedish court to six years in prison in 2022 for allowing her 12-year-old son to be recruited as a child soldier for Isis.

Senior prosecutor Reena Devgun told AFP that while investigating that case, authorities had received witness reports “that told us that she had kept slaves in Raqqa,” the former stronghold of the Islamic State group in northern Syria, prompting further investigations.

“If you take in Yazidis into your household when you are an Isis member or the wife of an Isis member and treat them this way, I argue that you are participating” in the broader campaign against them, Devgun said.

Devgun said the woman had kept nine people, three women and six children, in her home “as slaves”.

The women and children – who were kept in the house for between 20 days and seven months – were among other things made to perform household tasks.

Devgun said they had also been photographed, which the prosecutor argued “was done with the intention that they would be sold off”.

Evidence had mainly been gathered through witness accounts, from the victims and others that had visited the home at the time.

The crimes, which the woman denies, can carry a life sentence in Sweden.

Stockholm’s District Court said in a statement that the trial was scheduled to start on October 7th and was expected to last two months.

Around 300 Swedes or Swedish residents, a quarter of them women, joined IS in Syria and Iraq, mostly in 2013 and 2014, according to Sweden’s intelligence service Säpo.

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