Sawt Falasteen - Despair in Sweden as gangs recruit kids as contract killers

"Stay motivated, it'll come," answered his 19-year-old contact.

He went on to offer the child 150,000 kronor ($13,680) to carry out a murder, as well as clothes and transport to the scene of the crime, according to a police investigation of the exchange last year in the western province of Varmland seen by AFP.

In this case, four men aged 18 to 20 are accused of recruiting four minors aged 11 to 17 to work for a criminal gang. All were arrested before carrying out the crimes.

The preliminary inquiry contains a slew of screenshots that the youngsters sent to each other of themselves posing with weapons, some with bare chests or donning hooded masks.

Questioned by police, the 11-year-old said he wrote the message to seem "cool" and "not show his fear".

The case is not an isolated one.

Sweden has struggled to rein in a surge in gang shootings and bombings across the country in recent years, linked to score-settling and battles to control the drug market.

Last year, 53 people were killed in shootings, increasingly in public with innocent victims also dying.

- 'Killer wanted' -

Sweden's gang crime is organised and complex with gang leaders operating from abroad through intermediaries who use encrypted messaging sites like Telegram, Snapchat and Signal to recruit teens under 15, the age of criminal responsibility.

"It is organised as a kind of (job) market where missions are published on discussion forums, and the people accepting the assignments are increasingly young," Johan Olsson, the head of the Swedish police's National Operations Department (NOA), told reporters last month.

Hits are subcontracted with the parties only communicating online, Stockholm University criminology professor Sven Granath told AFP.

Others recruit in person, seeking out kids hanging around in their neighbourhoods.

The number of murder-related cases in Sweden where a suspect is under the age of 15 rose from 31 in the first eight months of 2023 to 102 in the same period this year, according to the Prosecution Authority.

Granath said the children who are recruited are often struggling in school, have addiction problems or attention deficit disorders, or have already been in trouble with the law.

"They are recruited into conflicts they have no connection to -- they're just mercenaries," he said, adding that they haven't necessarily been a member of a gang before.

Some children even seek out the contracts, according to a report from the National Council for Crime Prevention (BRA), as they look for cash, an adrenaline rush, recognition or a sense of belonging.

They're drawn in by flashy clothes as well as the promise of undying loyalty, experts say.

"Nowadays everybody wants to be a murderer," Viktor Grewe, a 25-year-old former gang member who had his first run-in with police when he was 13, told AFP.

"It's incredibly sad to see that this is what kids aspire to," he said, with some "crimfluencers" glorify criminal lifestyles on TikTok.

- 'Ruthless exploitation' -

There is a "ruthless exploitation of young people", Tony Quiroga, a police commander in Orebro, west of Stockholm, told AFP.

The criminal subcontractors "don't want to take any risks themselves", he said, protecting both themselves and those higher up the chain.

"They hide behind pseudonyms on social media and put several filters between themselves and the culprit."

In Orebro, volunteers patrol the streets of disadvantaged neighbourhoods to talk to youths about the risks of falling under the gangs' control.

Grewe, who turned his back on gang life when he was 22, said young criminals don't expect to live beyond the age of 25.

According to a recent BRA report, recruiting kids is part of the gangs' business model, where children recruit even younger children -- and once they're in, it's hard to leave.

Quiroga despaired that the police are up against conflicts "that never end".

X.Habash--SF-PST