The killer was only 14 and had been living in a youth home under the protection of the authorities since the age of eight.
A year ago, a gang helped the boy escape, put him up in a hotel, and gave him marijuana, food, and new clothes. Six days later, the gang members told him it was time to repay their kindness. They had a job for him.
Together with another youth, who cannot be identified as a teenager, he shot and killed a 33-year-old Hells Angels biker. He was convicted by a court which described the case as a gangland contract killing.
As he was too young to be sentenced, he was handed back to social services and sent to another juvenile home.
Sweden has long prided itself on having one of the world’s most generous social safety nets, caring for vulnerable people at all stages of life.
But these days it also has another feature: by far the highest per capita rate of gun violence in the European Union. Last year, 55 people were shot and killed in 363 separate shootings in the country of just 10 million. By comparison, the three other Nordic countries — Norway, Finland and Denmark — had just six fatal shootings combined.
In a growing number of cases, courts have found that an epidemic of violence is springing from Sweden’s youth homes, which were created for the dual purpose of caring for children in state care and punishing young offenders.
According to information obtained for this story from eight sources, including a former gang member, several youth home workers, prosecutors and criminologists, the homes have become recruiting grounds for gangs, which use them to recruit killers who are too young to go to prison.
From troubled teen to ‘career criminal’
Yayaha, now 23, was first sent to a juvenile home at the age of 16, where he lived with seven other boys in a hostel in Gothenburg, a port city on Sweden’s west coast that is home to Scandinavia’s largest port.
His father had died a few years earlier. He had dropped out of school and had been convicted of assault and theft, beating up other children and stealing their phones and clothes.
He told Reuters that during the year he spent at home, members of a Gothenburg criminal gang became his new family, including a coffee shop near the city’s harbour, where he now works as a carpenter after fleeing gang life.
“I was a troubled teenager when I arrived and I became a professional criminal when I got out. I went from fighting and stealing from other kids to selling drugs by the kilo,” said Yayha, who asked that his last name not be used to prevent his former gang from finding him.
“You wanted the respect, the clothes, the rings, the money, but also the friendships. They were the people you hung out with anyway. Later on it got more serious and you had to do things you didn’t really want to do, but that’s the way it is.”
The wave of violence has overtaken everything else in Swedish politics, leading to the rise of a right-wing coalition, supported by the far right, to power in 2022 and ending the latest eight-year period of rule by the Social Democrats, Sweden’s dominant political party since the 1930s.
The new government has promised to tackle crime. So far it has made Sweden’s previously liberal immigration policies more restrictive, introduced harsher sentences for gun crimes, and given police increased surveillance powers. The army has even been called in to help.
“It is clear that our system was not designed for this type of crime,” Justice Minister Gunnar Strömer told Reuters.
He said the government was working on a restructuring of the youth crime prevention system, including giving social services more power. The new youth prisons would house the most dangerous offenders, keeping them separate from youth homes.
“I think it’s clear that, in fact, state-run homes are serving as recruitment grounds for criminal networks,” Stromer said. “That’s a colossal failure.”
‘LinkedIn for young offenders’
The level of security in Sweden’s youth homes varies, with the approximately 700 most troubled youngsters housed in 21 homes run by the state body, the National Board for Institutional Care (SIS).
Children with social problems may find themselves sleeping next to children who have committed serious crimes. Most children stay for less than a year, but some may be kept for up to four years.
Homes are often fenced off, with schools and parks within the compound. While young people are not allowed to go outside without permission, security is often lax.
Residents have access to phones and tablets, allowing gang members to contact them from outside. In one case that is still pending trial, prosecutors have accused a 15-year-old boy of planning and ordering three murders from inside a youth home in Stockholm.
Birgitta Dahlberg, head of youth care at SIS, told Reuters it was unfair to blame the homes for their inability to deal with serious violent offenders because they were not designed to deal with such offenders.
“When it comes to serious crime, it’s fair to say the law hasn’t given us the right conditions,” he said, adding that staff did not have the authority to take away residents’ mobile phones until the rules were changed a few weeks ago.
Alexander, who works at the house in Gothenburg where Yahya lived, said children as young as 12 often become gang members. He declined to give his surname because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
“About half of our 40 boys are affiliated with a gang when they come here,” he told Reuters.
“If you put two new kids in a wing where six out of eight inmates are with the Foxtrot gang, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what can happen,” he said, referring to one of the largest gangs, which is believed to have hundreds of members.
Two other youth home staff, who asked not to be named, gave similar accounts of rampant gang membership among their pupils.
In theory, youth homes are intended to rehabilitate young offenders to prevent them from becoming adult criminals. But according to a report released a few weeks ago by the Swedish National Audit Office, the government watchdog, nine out of ten gang-affiliated youths in youth homes relapse into crime, and about eight out of ten eventually end up in prison.
Stockholm prosecutor Lisa dos Santos, who has handled many cases of youth gang crime, said youth homes cause more harm than good.
“One police officer has described them as LinkedIn for young criminals,” he said. “You’d be surprised what impact they have in spreading gang crime when boys from different parts of the country are put together.”
While Swedish law allows criminal prosecution of people as young as 15, people under 18 are rarely sent to prison, even for serious crimes. Dos Santos said gangs are taking advantage of this, deliberately involving children in acts that would carry long prison sentences for adults.
According to police reports last year, there are around 14,000 active gang offenders in Sweden and 48,000 people affiliated with gangs.
Other European countries such as the Netherlands, France and Belgium also struggle with violent gangs, but Sweden outperforms them all by a wide margin in gun violence.
According to the Crime Prevention Board, a government agency, 73 young people aged 15-20 in Sweden were suspected of murder or attempted murder in 2022, compared with just 10 a decade earlier.
According to the EU statistics agency Eurostat, 25 people aged 15-24 were killed by gun violence in Sweden in 2021, second only to France in the EU, where there were 40 such deaths in a population six times Sweden’s.
Nils Duquet, director of the Flemish Peace Institute, Europe’s leading gun violence think tank, said Sweden’s gangs’ reliance on young recruits to commit violent crimes has led to a different culture toward guns than elsewhere in Europe.
Elsewhere, he said, access to guns in criminal gangs is reserved for older and more senior members. In Sweden, the youngest people are expected to own guns.
“Because a lot of young offenders have guns, it’s become so violent,” Duquette said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)