Teens recruited as contract killers

“Bro, I can’t wait for my first dead body,” wrote an 11-year-old boy on Instagram in Sweden, where gangs recruit children too young to be prosecuted as contract killers on chat apps.

“Stay motivated, it’ll come,” answered his 19-year-old contact. He went on to offer the child 150000 kronor (about R249000) 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.

In this case, four men between the ages of 18 and 20 are accused of recruiting four minors between the ages of 11 and 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.

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 said.

Others recruit in person, seeking out kids 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 members 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,” said Viktor Grewe, a 25-year-old former gang member who had his first run-in with police when he was 13. “It’s incredibly sad to see that this is what kids aspire to,” he said, with some “crimfluencers” glorifying criminal lifestyles on TikTok.

There is a “ruthless exploitation of young people”, said Tony Quiroga, a police commander in Orebro, west of Stockholm. The criminal subcontractors “don’t want to take any risks themselves”, he said, protecting 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.

Cape Times