With three months to go before year's end, the number of explosions has nearly reached the record level of 2019, when 133 detonations occurred across Sweden.

According to a leading criminologist, Sweden is second only to Mexico, in terms of countries around the globe that are not at war and have the highest number of bomb attacks on their territory. Ardavan Khoshnood, a visiting professor at Malmo University and senior fellow at Lund University, has warned that the Scandinavian country had become the bombing capital of Europe. Now, Sweden is the sore thumb, he told the daily Svenska Dagbladet newspaper.

Several cities across Sweden are plagued by warfare between criminal gangs, and the authorities are fighting a desperate, impossible battle against them.

And indeed, authorities are in a challenging predicament, having registered 130 bomb attacks across Sweden so far this year, just three short of the previous record.

„With three months to go before year’s end, the number of bombings has already almost reached the record level of 2019, when 133 detonations occurred across Sweden. There are no other countries in Europe, apart from war-torn Ukraine, that are in a similar situation,”

– said Mr Khoshnood, who also warned that those responsible for the bombings are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their approach.

„We’ve seen a move towards more powerful explosive charges. Initially, they were throwing hand grenades, but now we see a shift towards explosives and more sophisticated detonations,” the senior criminologist explained.

In September, the situation in Sweden declined drastically, with 11 fatal shootings and 11 bombings reported nationwide.

The latest incident occurred a few days ago in an Uppsala apartment, about one hour’s drive north of Stockholm. The explosion killed a 25-year-old civilian who was not a member of any gang. Police say the target of the attack was a neighbour of the victim, who may have been an associate of 37-year-old Rawa Majid. Majid is involved in a power struggle to gain control over the notorious Foxtrot criminal gang that operates in Sweden.

In Sweden, the practice of gang members using detonation explosives is a relatively recent phenomenon, virtually non-existent before the turn of the millennium. However, with the rise of gang warfare, undeniably coupled with a large wave of mass immigration, the number of reports of explosive detonations increased sharply in the 2010s, prompting the Crime Prevention Council to start recording statistics on explosive detonations in 2018. Since then, the number of such incidents registered across Sweden has fluctuated between 79 and 133 per year.