Drug trafficking is a significant source of income for the criminal networks that depend on the proceeds, and more and more children are being sacrificed in the ongoing gang war.
– It is primarily party-hungry Swedes who fuel the deadly violence, says Diamant Salihu, author and reporter at SVT.
More and more young people are drawn into violence
– Violence begets violence and the gross violence spreads in the country, the conflicts in Sandviken reflect what it looks like nationally, says Fredrik Sjöshult, crime columnist at Expressen.
Diamant Salihu believes that ever younger children are drawn in and ruthlessly beaten and murdered in the ongoing gang war is a way to set an example after these people may have hesitated or failed in their mission.
– If you don’t follow through, there will be consequences, says Salihu
The criminals look in areas where there is a great deal of exclusion.
– The terrible thing is that there are so many children who are prepared to take on the assignments and who really want to become criminals and dream of having an aura like a killer.
Toxic cocktail
The drug is the first thing that attracts the young to start hanging out and earn some money, with great risk of course. And hundreds of kilos of drugs enter Sweden and fill the war coffers of the criminal gangs. That is what makes it possible to pay a young person to commit an act of violence, says Salihu.
The instigators of the murders are abroad and order various types of narcotics on a large scale.
– Bringing the drugs into Sweden is ridiculously easy, you must be unlucky if you get caught, says Salihu.
– If you get huge quantities of drugs into the country, the prices are dumped and the competition between the gangs increases. There are always people higher up the food chain who don’t stick to the guns, but who make sure the sale is made possible.
The money must be taken from the gangs to stop new recruitment, says Salihu.
– That’s where it stings the most and the driving force disappears.
“Sweden risks becoming a transit country”
Customs lacks both personnel and scanner equipment to search through trucks and containers that arrive at the ports, explains Salihu.
– It takes a few hundred million for Customs to have the best technical equipment
to access these innovative gangs, he says.
– The situation is very worrying. The risk is not only that there will be conflicts in Sweden, but that criminal networks that bring in narcotics with cargo boats choose to send their containers to Helsingborg instead of sending them to Rotterdam. Sweden thus becomes a transit country for large drug traffickers from, for example, Colombia, says Salihu.
Kurdish fox: The drug and the war
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