Gangs in 1990s Sweden were identifiable by dark sunglasses, leather jackets and an obsession with Harley Davidson motorcycles.
Known for selling drugs and starting brawls, these groups had names like Hells Angels or Los Bandidos inspired by the famous bikers that terrified middle America in the 1960s.
There were few who relished the sound of grunting engines when a biker gang rolled up at a local beer house, and conflicts could be bloody and sometimes ended in murder.
However, compared to the chaos Sweden faces today, the Hells Angels era feels like an age of innocence.
Gang warfare on the streets of cities like Gothenburg, Malmo and Stockholm now involves flats being blown to pieces and shootings in shopping centres. Across Sweden, bombings took place every three days and shootings every 28 hours last year, figures obtained by the Express from the Swedish police show.
The new year began with 31 explosions and a murder involving a ‘foreign power’ and, as he addressed the nation in the wake of the carnage, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson admitted it was “obvious that [he had] no control over the wave of violence”.
The origins of this bloody escalation, according to criminologist Ardavan Khoshnood, an associate professor at Lund University, lie in the turn of the century.
“In the beginning of the 2000s we started witnessing more street gangs and more ethnical criminal groups,” he told the Express.
“They mainly started to grow in areas we call ‘vulnerable’ with a lot of unemployment, low education and socio-economic status. [Today] the criminals have taken over that society to a quite a high degree.
“When these gangs started to come to power they [developed] different territories and got very quickly deep into drug trafficking.
“[By the late 2000s] the rate of shootings started to increase between the criminal gangs and quite quickly we had a major problem.”
But it was becoming harder for police to investigate these incidents, Khoshnood explained, because there were so many international criminal networks plugged into the Swedish domestic crime scene.
Strung out across countries around the world, the arrangements between these gangsters could exist on a temporary or permanent basis making it incredibly hard for the authorities to target them.
“The studies we have conducted on the gangs and the criminal networks is that they are not based on, for example, religious beliefs or ethinicity,” the academic continued.
“But I would say close to about 90% of those criminal gangs and criminal networks are individuals with an immigrant background.
“They come from the Middle East and the Balkans, but you can have a mixture of both of them in the same gang.
“What’s important for them is the loyalty, drug trafficking and territory. So we see shootings [and bombings] because of revenge, trafficking and turf.”
Academic Goran Adamson blames generations of Swedish politicians for letting the criminal gangs take over.
“Many politicians say the [violence] is inexplicable, [that] ‘we cannot understand’ [and] ‘this is outrageous’,” he told the Express.
“But I would say this it’s very rational. The bottom line is that we are witnessing a fight between criminal gangs in Sweden. This has been escalating and it has been allowed to escalate because Sweden has become a huge magnet for criminals from [abroad].”
He believed that rather than tackle the root cause successive governments have engaged in bureaucratic measures that border on absurd.
“Maybe even the funniest thing about the whole tragedy in Sweden is the ways in which Swedish politicians, academics and journalists try to handle it,” he added.
“They try to solve this in the standard Swedish way, which is the technocratic; ‘there are technocratic solutions to everything’.
“You know, instead of trying to persuade or maybe do something stronger against those setting off these explosions we are mapping better or worse areas in terms of the risk of bombings.
“When people construct tunnels they get a prize because a particular tunnel was made in such a way so you could see from one end to the other, which makes it less attractive for people who want to shoot, kill and rape.”
