Famed for its openness and slower pace of life, Sweden is one of the last places you might expect to see children being pulled off the streets and searched without a warrant, or having their phones spied on by detectives.

But after four years of gang violence that has seen children as young as 12 recruited on social media to carry out hit jobs against rival gangsters, police say it has become a grim but necessary reality.

In April 2024, Swedish police were handed sweeping new powers to tackle the rise of Middle Eastern drug syndicates that were grooming boys and girls into being “foot soldiers” by offering them up to 150,000 kroner (£12,500) per job.

Across Swedish cities, officers now have the power to stop and search people – including children – and vehicles without specific suspicion of a crime, similar in scope to powers given to police in Britain.

Children under the age of 15 can also be placed under phone and internet surveillance by police if they are suspected of serious crimes, such as being involved in gang assassinations or bomb making.

Two years on, the laws – which had prompted outcry amongst liberals – are working. Sweden has seen the biggest decline in gun violence since the crisis began in 2022, according to the latest data.

The number of shootings in Sweden fell by 63 per cent in 2025 with 147 last year compared to a peak of 390 in 2022, when narcotics gang Foxtrot began a major, deadly power struggle with its rivals.

Murder and manslaughter rates have also fallen to their lowest level in a decade, in a country that recently suffered from the second-highest gun-related death rate in the European Union.

The decline in violence has come as an immense relief to Sweden’s centre-Right government, led by Ulf Kristersson, the prime minister, as it had made smashing the gangs – to borrow a phrase from Sir Keir Starmer – a major priority.

Arrests of senior Foxtrot members in the Middle East, anonymous witness testimonies and the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 13 have also been credited with the major decline of shootings.

Yet it is the safe zones’ success that is perhaps the most surprising element of Sweden’s achievement, considering how grossly unpopular they were among campaigners and rights groups. Civil liberty campaigners had warned against the racial profiling of civilians, while the United Nations called the measures “repugnant and illegal”.

In virtually all cases, Sweden’s safe zones target neighbourhoods where residents come from a migration background, as this is the main recruiting pool for Foxtrot gangsters who seek out alienated youths who are easy to manipulate.

Under the new scheme, officers are allowed to pick out children based on clues that they might be involved in a gang, such as wearing clothing brands associated with that lifestyle.

‘Trust in the police to use safe zones’

Swedish police chiefs told The Telegraph they had been braced for a major backlash when they started setting up the safe zones – but the reaction from foreign-born residents was not what they expected.

“Some were scared that it would be a form of discrimination, but what was interesting was that most of the people who live in these areas have a foreign background, and they responded positively to it,” Carin Götblad, a police chief in Stockholm, told The Telegraph.

“They wanted to have them, because they were scared and they trusted the police to use them. They didn’t feel they were being discriminated against, it was those from a Swedish background who were not so positive about it,” added Ms Götblad, who specialises in dealing with youth gang violence.

She stressed that the safe zones had been used sparingly in Sweden, which could explain why there was limited pushback, and that they were just one of several new tools at the disposal of police to counter youth gang crime.

The centre-Right government has helped police by pushing through a law that lowers the age of responsibility from 15 to 13 in cases of serious crimes.

Gangs such as Foxtrot, led by Rawa Majid, would recruit children aged about 13 years old on social media to carry out contract killings against rivals, knowing that they would never be prosecuted as they were too young.

In one case, a 14-year-old boy nicknamed Fernando Sucre was hired by a gang on social media to fire a Kalashnikov-style rifle into the front door of a rival’s apartment. A Telegraph investigation found he had received the orders on how to carry out the attack while he was playing a Fifa football video game in a youth club.

Footage shows the boy, then 14, opening fire with the rifle as the attack is filmed by an accomplice, who was also a child. Fernando was later caught, but he was too young to face justice and was released without charge.

Credit: Swedish Prosecution Service

The new laws have closed this loophole in an effort to make children a less useful option for gangsters and cut off their supply of “foot soldiers”.

Ms Götblad also said police were allowed to step up wiretapping of suspects while they were plotting targeted killings.

“We are able to listen in on suspects, including before a crime has happened, and we are stopping young people on their way to carry out shootings,” she said.

The Swedish police chief was referring to a new law, which came into force in October, which allows the phone calls and online activity of under-15s to be monitored by security services if they suspect they are involved in gangs.

The gang’s “handlers” often organise the hits over social media. A Telegraph investigation revealed that young girls were being recruited as bomb makers. Text messages and video footage showed how one 17-year-old girl, Olivia, was hired to build and deliver a firebomb for an arson attack on a rival gang member’s home.

Such young women are nicknamed “green ladies” by the gangs, and are known to deliberately take on particularly violent and dangerous assignments to compete for promotions with their male counterparts.

According to court documents seen by The Telegraph, Olivia was later convicted of aiding and abetting arson, for which she received a one-year prison sentence.

Police hope that cases like this will be stamped out with wiretapping.

Along with tougher sentences for gang members, the Swedish government now allows witnesses in gang trials to testify anonymously if there is a threat to their well-being.

One major breakthrough for investigators occurred last month, when Sweden announced that a 21-year-old man who is “very close to” Foxtrot’s leader was arrested in Iraq.

Ali Shehab, who is on Europol’s most wanted list, is accused of remotely organising contract killings committed by children in Sweden, while himself being based in Iraq.

The tactics that have been implemented over the past two years have seen major success in terms of declines of murder rates and gang violence.

The extent to which Britain could learn from Sweden’s success is less clear. The UK already has safe zones of a kind in the form of its Section 60 search procedure, as well as the “stop and search” scheme which allow any person to be searched if there are “reasonable grounds” of a crime.

But like Sweden, Britain is working to step up its surveillance of criminal networks, with Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, announcing the creation of an FBI-style National Police Service to take over counter-terrorism, fraud and organised crime investigations.

Serious issues remain in Sweden, Ms Götblad pointed out, with Foxtrot gangsters still heavily relying on websites such as Instagram to advertise murder contracts.

Her police force is having to proactively reach out and ask the social media companies to delete such posts once they appear, when it is often too late, because a child has already signed up.

The decision to lower the age of criminal responsibility in serious crimes to 13 has also merely pushed the gangs to try and find even younger catspaws for their gruesome work.

”We’ve also seen that [the gangs] are now trying to recruit young people in football arenas, as well as on social media,” Ms Götblad said, adding that a recent case involved a 12-year-old boy.

As a result, Swedish police chiefs and the government are not claiming victory over the gangs yet.

“I want to remain humble. This is complicated, and we still have levels of violence no decent society can accept,” Gunnar Strommer , the Swedish justice minister, told Reuters in a recent interview.

But they do feel that the tide is finally turning against an enemy which uses almost unfathomably cruel and cynical methods to carry out murder hits.

“We are not sure that we have broken it, because it’s so complicated and it’s so deeply rooted in our society,” said Ms Götblad. “But I must say, and I say this very seldom, that the police are working much more effectively…and we are much faster in dealing with the problem than we used to be.”

Even so, she is concerned that the need for safe zones, and electronic surveillance, and the general hardening of Sweden’s legal system, has perhaps robbed her country of an ineffable part of its warm and welcoming culture.

“I’m very saddened that we used to have such an open society, where you can talk with anyone, and we have had to close it down more and more,” she said.