A 16 -year -old young man was arrested after a shooting killed three young people on Tuesday in Uppsala, sixty kilometers north of Stockholm, reviving the fear of a new episode of the Gang War in Sweden.
The three victims, aged 15 to 20, were killed late Tuesday afternoon in a hair salon, stunning passers-by of this university city on the eve of Walpurgis celebrations, which take place on April 30 and bring together more than 100,000 people each year, especially students, around joy.
“A 16 -year -old teenager was arrested, suspected of the murder of three people who were killed on Tuesday in the center of Uppsala,” the Swedish prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday in a statement. The suspect was arrested at his home, said the prosecutor in charge of the case Andreas Nyberg, to AFP.
According to Swedish media, at least one of the victims had links with organized crime, which the police have not confirmed.
“This is something that we are obviously examining, but we do not want to embark on this only possibility,” said a spokesperson for the Uppsala police, Stefan Larsson, to AFP.
Sweden has been trying to stem a wave of shootings and bomb attacks by rival gangs for several years, especially for drug trafficking control.
Several people “considered as an interest in the investigation” are in addition questioned, said a police official, Erik Åkerlund, at a press conference. According to him, the police also obtained images of scene surveillance cameras and “gathered many evidence”.
Uppsala has long been the basis of the two most famous rival gang leaders in Sweden, Ismael Abdo and Rawa Majid, but the two men are suspected of now orchestrating their operations from abroad.
The Minister of Justice Gunnar Strömmer deemed these new violence “extremely serious”.
Innocent victims
Members of the crisis team set up by the municipality were held around the security perimeter still in place Wednesday morning in the city center, according to an AFP journalist.
“Like everyone, I am shocked, dismayed by what happened, and I am also angry that it can happen,” said the mayor of Uppsala, Erik Pelling, Tuesday evening. “We are forced to live with these crimes, I am frustrated that we have not managed to tackle this problem more effectively.”
If deadly violence decreased last year in Sweden, these violent episodes continue to shake up the major cities of the country.
A mother and her young child were seriously injured on Sunday by an artisanal explosive device in a commune southwest of Stockholm, a neighbor suspected of links with organized crime being suspected of being the real target, according to the media.
On April 14, two people were killed in a shooting in Göteborg, the second city city, an attack which could also be linked to a rivalry between gangs.
In these attacks, the authors are more and more often adolescents who are engaged as a hitman because they are under 15, the age of criminal responsibility in Sweden.
Swedish police said in January that the number of shootings had decreased in 2024 for the second consecutive year, with 296 shootings, a decrease of 20 % compared to the previous year.
In this country of 10.6 million inhabitants, 92 cases of fatal violence were recorded in 2024, 29 less than in 2023, according to a report by the Swedish National Council for crime prevention (BRA) published in late March.
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