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Swedish gang pays teens to kill
The Manchester case
Johannes Natland was 18 when the group recruited him in Norway. Two days later he flew to Manchester and picked up guns in woodland in Huddersfield. Counterterrorism police arrested him in a hotel room there with two guns and 19 rounds of ammunition. The judge said she was sure he would have gone through with the hit, and that teenage drug addiction had left him cut off from the family and social network he grew up in. Police have not been able to establish who his intended victim was or who paid for the killing.
The Foxtrot Network
According to Swedish investigative journalist Diamant Salihu, Foxtrot's leader, Rawa Majid, is based in Iran, and the network has coordinated attacks on gang rivals and Israeli targets. It offers children and young adults money and status for detonations, killings, and extortions, and it wants them arrested so it never has to pay them. There are examples of 13-year-olds armed and shooting at people and of murders committed by 15-year-olds, many of whom saw a murder ad on Telegram, Instagram, or TikTok.
Sweden's response
Swedish authorities have traveled abroad to pursue recruiters and gang leaders, with arrests in Turkey, Tunisia, and Morocco, though the leader himself is still free. Since this summer, Swedish police can demand that social media companies remove murder ads within one hour or face fines, and new ads keep appearing.
Why do gangs recruit teenagers for violence?
Europol's assessments of organized crime have noted that criminal networks recruit minors partly because many legal systems punish them less severely than adults. Teenagers are also cheap to pay, easy to pressure, and expendable to the people giving the orders. In Sweden, the age of criminal responsibility has long been set at 15, so a child under that age generally cannot be prosecuted.
How do gangs recruit through social media?
Recruiters post offers in public channels and then move the conversation to private, encrypted messaging. Payment is promised for a specific job, and the recruit and the person ordering it often never meet. Network leaders therefore stay several steps removed from the act itself. That distance is why investigators often cannot identify who paid for an attack.
Why is the removal deadline only one hour?
Posts spread and get copied within minutes, so a deadline of days would let an ad do its work before it comes down. The European Union's regulation on terrorist content online, which has applied since June 2022, sets the same one-hour deadline for removing such content after an order from authorities.
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