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After Tuesday’s shooting of a Swedish man in Norway, concern is growing in the country that gang violence will spill over the border.
“It is time to act. If not, we will soon have ‘Swedish conditions'”, the chairman of the Norwegian police union Unn Alma Skatvold warns the government in a statement on Wednesday.
A Swedish man in his 30s was shot with several shots in the town of Moss, south of Oslo, on Tuesday afternoon.
The man is being treated in hospital with serious injuries, but his condition is not believed to be life-threatening.
No one has yet been arrested for the shooting, but police suspect it is connected to gang crime. It has fueled concerns in Norway that the ongoing wave of violence in Sweden will spread westward.
Concerns about expansion
To a question from VG about the Foxtrot network, one of the criminal gangs driving the wave of violence in Sweden, Kjetil Tunold, head of intelligence at the Norwegian National Criminal Police Kripos, answers:
– They are at the forefront of the wave of violence in Sweden, and we have seen that they have an enormous capacity for violence. There is a concern that they may extend this to Norway.
Kripos has already said that Swedish criminal networks are active almost all over Norway and that you can see signs of Swedish influence over Norwegian organized crime. It is, for example, about gang criminals ordering serious crimes from people in the same circles in Sweden, says Kjetil Tunold.
“Swedish relationships”
Even the Norwegian police union warns of the development towards what they call “Swedish conditions”. According to chairman Unna Alm Skatvold, the government must act by strengthening the police’s preparedness to avoid ending up in the same situation as the neighboring country.
“When Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre repeatedly – most recently today – says that he takes the situation very seriously, I wonder what he intends to do about it,” she says in a statement.