From The Times, November 30:
‘Handlers’ recruit alienated youths as young as 11 on social media while state care for young offenders is overwhelmed
Fernando, a hitman for a Swedish narcotics gang, checks his phone as it pings with his latest orders: collect the guns, go to the target’s front door and fire until he runs out of bullets.
“Yeah, I understand brother,” he replies casually. He collects two pistols, a Kalashnikov rifle and an accomplice, before hurrying to their target in a suburb of Stockholm.
But this is no ordinary gang hit. Fernando is 14, a teenage assassin who was playing a Fifa video game in his youth club when the orders arrived by text.
He is one among dozens of child contract killers in Sweden, recruited by gang middle-men on social media who pay as much as 150,000 kroner (£13,000) per job.
The number of murder cases involving child suspects in Sweden, which has the highest per capita rate of gun violence in the EU, has exploded over the past year. The figures rose from 31 counts in the first eight months of 2023 to 102 in the same period of this year, according to Sweden’s prosecution authority.
Swedish prosecutors and police say the use of children, many of them from an impoverished or foreign background, to commit murders on that scale is unprecedented. One recent case involved a boy of just 11 years old....
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