The CHILD assassins as younger as ELEVEN finishing up machine-gun murders on the streets of Sweden for as much as £13,000 successful… and CANNOT be prosecuted

Swedish gangs are increasingly recruiting children to carry out contract killings, authorities have warned, with the country being overrun by a ‘gig economy of gang violence’ in recent months.

The Nordic nation has the worst rate of gun violence in the EU, while the number of murder cases involving children more than tripled from 31 counts in the first eight months of 2023 to 102 in the same period of this year, according to authorities. 

Youngsters are lured by recruiters on social media platforms such as Snapchat and Telegram, with group chats titled ‘bombing today’ and ‘who wants to shoot someone in Stockholm’ reportedly attracting thousands of members.

The children – who are often vulnerable and from poor backgrounds – are promised quick cash, with bounties of up to £13,000 offered for a successful hit.

Once signed up, the young recruits carry out gang bosses’ dirty work, assassinating relatives of rival gangsters and other targets, often without ever meeting the person who is ordering the killing.

Crime bosses increasingly seek out children under 15 as they are too young to be prosecuted in Sweden, according to police, with a boy aged just 11 years old reportedly involved in a recent case.

Children travelling across the country to commit the crimes for cash is becoming ‘the new normal’, Erik Lindblad, head of the police’s gang violence taskforce, warned last month.

He said that online chat groups were advertising jobs to ‘tens of thousands’ of young members, inviting them to volunteer to carry out a hit.

Gangs have increasingly sought out young girls and children with mental disabilities to carry out the killings, as they believe they are less likely to be suspected by their target.

They deliberately hire children as Swedish law dictates that under-15s cannot be prosecuted, a law which critics say is in urgent need of reform.

Confronted by the increased involvement of young people in violent gang crime, prosecutors are increasingly seeking imprisonment rather than ‘closed care’ for child suspects, according to Swedish media.

Three teenagers were sentenced after a man was murdered while eating dinner at a restaurant south of Stockholm in March, with the 17-year-old who is believed to have fired the fatal shot handed a jail term rather than youth detention.

The teenager, who is understood to have used an automatic weapon, was given eight years while a 19-year-old man was given life in prison and their 16-year-old accomplice put in closed care.

According to prosecutor Niksa Lucic, the circumstances of the murder suggest that it took place in a gangland context.

In August, a 16-year-old boy was arrested after shots were fired at an apartment door near Stockholm.

He was charged last month with attempted murder and aggravated weapons offences after a preliminary police investigation found he was put up to the hit by an ‘anonymous client’.

They say he accepted the contract for 65,000 Swedish kroner (£4,600) and had told a friend on Instagram: ‘I just want to kill someone – I don’t care who it is’.

Carin Götblad, a police chief in Stockholm at the National Operations Department, told The Telegraph that child suspects often show no remorse for their actions.

‘The investigators tell me that some of them are very calm, they don’t cry, they say nothing or “no comment” They are totally lacking in empathy,’ she said. 

‘Some people say, “they don’t understand what they have done”. They may not fully understand the consequences of what they have done, but if you are 14 years old and you shoot a person in the head – you will understand that this man is dead.’

Dramatic video obtained by MailOnline last year showed a teenager armed with an AK-47 spraying bullets into the home of a terrified mother and her young child in a Stockholm suburb.

The flat is the home of the ex-girlfriend of a well-known rapper and the attack is believed to have been a scare tactic.

A frightened mother, who lives in the block, told MailOnline at the time: ‘It was crazy. It wasn’t a small gun. It was a Kalashnikov. It is terrible that attacks like this are normalised.’ 

In another case which sent shockwaves through Sweden, a two-year-old girl was shot in the stomach through her stuffed Winne the Pooh toy while her father was killed and mother seriously injured by a 16-year-old gunman.

The horror attack, described by one lawyer as the most brutal case she had ever worked on, unfolded in October last year when the attacker broke into the family’s home in Stockholm’s Vastberga district.

A Swedish court heard how the teenage shooter gunned down the father at near-point-blank range before turning the automatic rifle on the mother, who was clutching her two-year-old daughter in her arms.

‘It’s so brutal that you can hardly believe it,’ Swedish prosecutor Lisa dos Santos said. 

‘The father was shot lying on the couch, the mother was shot in the back. She was a doctor, so she tried to save herself and the child, and they both survived. I would say that’s the worst thing I’ve ever had in my career.’

It later emerged that the killer had broken into the wrong house because his victims had the same last name as his intended target. 

The next day, the same attacker carried out another heinous contract killing of two women – a 60-year-old grandmother and a 20-year-old – who were relatives of a rival gang member.

After he was caught, a Swedish court handed the teenager a record jail sentence of 12 years.

Police have warned how the crime bosses who use youngsters to mete out bloodshed on their behalf are often abroad and can escape justice.

Taskforce leader Lindblad has urged social media companies to act to police their platforms and for society to take such online activities more seriously.

‘If a criminal had stood in a square and shouted out to 10,000 children, “Murder, Malmö, 250,000 kroner, who will take it?”, then I am quite sure that society would have reacted,’ he said, adding that police are working to be more present online.

Last month, a Swedish teenager was arrested in Spain for allegedly leading a gun-for-hire service which used ‘child soldiers’ in Sweden and Denmark.

The 14-year-old allegedly ‘played a key role’ in recruiting, paying and instructing youngsters on how to carry out attacks via the Telegram messaging app, Spanish cops said.

He would also organise deliveries of weapons and explosives including assault rifles, it is claimed. One teenager was given an escape plan involving an electric scooter.

The going rate for a kill was said to be between 20,000 and 50,000 euros.

The boy’s parents were also arrested and police said the family home in Alicante was used as an ‘operations centre’.

Deadly violence linked to feuds between criminal gangs has escalated in recent years, with hundreds of shootings and several bombings carried out.

In recent years, mafia groups abroad have called Sweden a ‘haven’ for their activities, while organised crime groups have infiltrated business sectors and found ways to smuggle military-grade weapons into the country.

September 2023 was a particularly bloody month, with over 40 violent episodes and 12 deaths recorded in just 20 days – earning the moniker ‘Black September’.

In all of 2023, 53 people were killed in shootings across Sweden, which is home to around 10.5 million people. 

In 2022, that figure stood at 62 – and Stockholm’s per-capita murder rate was roughly 30 times that of London’s.

Gangsters carry out personal vendettas against each other – or hire youngsters to do their dirty work.

Almost half the suspects in the gun-related murders in 2022 were aged between 15 and 20 – youngsters who have been groomed by gangs.

‘Kurdish Fox’, whose real name is Rawa Majid, became a household name in Sweden 2022 when the feud between the 38-year-old’s criminal network Foxtrot and the Dalen gang, led by Mikael ‘The Greek’ Tenezos, 25, spread fear in several cities as they fought over shares of the country’s highly lucrative drugs market. 

The two alleged kingpins have fled abroad, and are now believed to run their operations through middle men.