Denmark and Sweden vow to track down gang leaders who hire minors to kill from abroad

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — The Danish and Swedish justice ministers vowed Wednesday to crack down on foreign organized crime leaders who they say hired teenagers in Sweden to carry out deadly shootings in Denmark.

Dane Peter Hummelgaard has said that gangs have hired young Swedes to commit crimes in Denmark at least 25 times since April, partly because Swedish law imposes lighter sentences for minors who commit serious crimes.

“Several people who orchestrate this reckless and violent crime are hiding under warmer skies, and that is of course completely unacceptable,” Hummelgaard told a news conference Wednesday after meeting his Swedish counterpart Gunnar Strömmer in Copenhagen. He said they were “often in the Middle East” but did not name a specific country.

One of the two largest gangs in Sweden is led by a man with Swedish and Turkish citizenship who lives in Turkey, a country that refuses to extradite its own citizens.

Swedish and Danish media report that the gang is involved in a deadly feud with one of the largest criminal gangs in Denmark — Loyal to Familia which was banned in 2021.

Sweden struggles with gang violence In Denmark, the police have been dealing with gang violence for years, albeit on a lesser scale.

Last year, Swedish police noted an increase in the number of teenagers under the age of 18 being recruited to carry out commissioned killings, as they do not face the same police checks as adults and are often protected from prosecution.

Strömmer said Sweden would tighten its laws. Minors convicted of murder in Sweden are placed in juvenile detention centers, while in Denmark they can face up to 16 years in prison.

The two also pledged to crack down on online gang activity, with Strömmer saying that “leading figures in these criminal networks order murders and bombings completely openly online.”

Hummelgaard previously indicated that solutions could include amending Danish legislation to allow facial recognition technology and deploying better software to check encrypted messages.