COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — The Danish and Swedish justice ministers vowed Wednesday to go after organized crime leaders abroad, whom they say have been hiring teenagers in Sweden to carry out deadly shootings in Denmark.
Denmark’s Peter Hummelgaard has said that gangs have hired young Swedes to commit crimes in Denmark at least 25 times since April, in part because Swedish law imposes lighter penalties for minors who commit serious crimes.
“Several of the people who orchestrate this reckless and violent crime are hiding under warmer skies, and of course this is completely unacceptable,” Hummelgaard told a press conference Wednesday after a meeting with his Swedish counterpart Gunnar Strömmer in Copenhagen. He said they were “often in the greater Middle East” but didn’t name any specific country.
One of Sweden’s two major gangs is led by a Swedish-Turkish dual national who lives in Turkey, which refuses to extradite its own citizens.
Swedish and Danish media say that gang is involved in a deadly feud with one of the main criminal gangs in Denmark — Loyal to Familia which was banned in 2021.
Sweden has grappled with gang violence for years, while in Denmark, police have also seen violence between gangs but on a lesser scale.
Last year, Swedish police noted an increase in the number of teenagers under 18 who were recruited to carry out killings for hire because they do not face the same police controls as adults and are often shielded from prosecution.
Strömmer said that Sweden would tighten its laws, noting that minors who are convicted of murder in Sweden are placed in juvenile facilities, while they can face up to 16 years in prison in Denmark.
The two also vowed to crack down on online gang activity, with Strömmer saying that “leading figures in these criminal networks order murders and bombings totally out in the open online.”
Earlier, Hummelgaard has said that solutions could include changing Danish law to allow facial recognition technology, and deploying better software to monitor encrypted messages.
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