Sweden will fast-track new legislation to allow electronic surveillance of minors after a series of gang-related bombings in Stockholm this month, the prime minister said on Thursday.
The country has been plagued by gang violence, which has dramatically escalated over the past two decades. In 2023, it recorded the highest level of fatal gun violence per capita in Europe.
An unprecedented spate of bombings, numbering more than 30 since the start of 2025, primarily in the Stockholm area, has prompted the government to take action.
Police say that most of these explosive attacks are acts of extortion by gangs against companies and citizens.
“It is quite obvious that we don’t have control over the wave of violence,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said after a meeting with the Council Against Organised Crime involving government, police, and customs officials.
The January bombings have caused damage to buildings and some injuries but, as yet, no fatalities.
The incidents have been so commonplace that police have ordered residents in some areas of the south of the capital to remain indoors.
Gangs have taken to social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram over the past two years to hire youngsters to carry out attacks, police say.
“Today, we see 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds carrying out horrific violent missions as if they were extra jobs,” National Police Commissioner Petra Lundh said. “The missions are openly advertised on digital marketplaces.”
Kristersson said the government will push through legislation this year to allow police to search phones and electronically eavesdrop on people under the age of 15.
“This is important so we get to those who often sit far away and order crimes by children in Sweden,” Kristersson said. “If this is not done, we will use Swedish law against their ability to use the platforms in this way.”
He criticized social media platforms for not doing enough to protect children.
On Wednesday, a government-appointed commission said that criminals can be sent abroad to serve their sentences due to an influx of inmates arrested for gang violence.
Mattias Wahlstedt, head of the commission, said there were no legal obstacles to renting prison slots abroad but that a proposal allowing that to happen would have to pass through parliament before any criminals were sent outside Sweden.
“There is a need to work with new solutions within the Prison and Probation Service,” Swedish Justice Minister Gunnar Strommer told a news conference. Strommer said Sweden was already in talks about renting space in foreign prisons.
In 2023, the latest year for which records are available, courts handed out sentences totaling just under 200,000 months (more than 16,500 years), a 25 percent increase from the previous year and double the total handed down in 2014.
Sweden’s Prison and Probation Service says it will need about 27,000 beds by 2033, up from 11,000 today.
