Prime minister, Sweden announced that he will hold talks with the head of the Swedish armed forces and the police commissioner to discuss ways to stem gang violence following a wave of attacks that have resulted in at least 11 people killed so far this month.
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said that he would meet with the armed forces’ supreme commander and the national police commissioner on Friday to explore ‘how the armed forces can help police in their work against the criminal gangs’.
‘Sweden has never before seen anything like this,’ Kristersson said on Thursday in a rare televised address to the nation.
‘No other country in Europe is seeing anything like this,’ he said.
Africa Today News, New Yor reports thatTwo people were killed in separate shootings in Stockholm on Wednesday, and a woman in her 20s was killed when a bomb tore up a house in Uppsala in the early hours of Thursday.
‘This is a difficult time for Sweden,’ Kristersson said in his speech.
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‘A 25-year-old woman went to bed last night on a completely ordinary evening but never got to wake up,’ he said.
‘We will hunt the gangs, we will defeat the gangs’ he added.
It was not immediately clear in what capacity the military would get involved in tackling Sweden’s gang problem, but previous proposals have focused on soldiers taking over protection duties from police to free up more resources for crime-fighting.
Getting the military involved in crime-fighting would be a highly unusual step for Sweden, but it underscores the severity of the gang violence that has claimed almost a dozen lives across the country so far this month, including teenagers and innocent bystanders.
The police estimate that about 30,000 people in Sweden are directly involved with or have ties to gang crime. The violence has also spread from major urban areas to smaller towns where violent crime was previously rare.