Odakra, a sleepy village in southern Sweden, offers little excitement on a typical weeknight. But at 3am on January 28th residents awoke to a bang: an improvised explosive device had detonated. An hour later another bomb went off in Karrtorp, a Stockholm suburb. Within a day four more had rocked the capital.

Swedish gangs have been setting off bombs for years, but the scale of recent attacks is unprecedented. There were over 30 in January, and police say they foiled at least as many. Now gang violence is spilling out into the business community. According to Hampus Nygards, a national police official, most recent bombings have been “strategic acts aimed at companies, often for the purpose of extortion”.

Sweden’s entrepreneurs are being shaken down. Gangs like the “Foxtrot” group single out vulnerable businesses to threaten. If they do not pay, a bomb may be placed at a workplace or home. Houses have been levelled, but most explosions do not kill. They serve as a warning: pay up or blow up. Daniel Gazett, a police spokesperson, says small firms are usually targeted by gangs “collecting on made-up or real debts”. The hospitality and construction industries are particularly exposed, says Lena Nitz, a security expert at Svenskt Naringsliv, an employers’ association. Restaurants and hotels are useful for money-laundering. Building sites are good sources for explosives, supplementing gangs’ supplies of grenades from the Balkans.

The shift may be driven partly by more effective law enforcement. Police have cracked down on gangs engaged in the drug trade, says Casio Dahir, a social worker, making extortion a better bet. Sweden’s open approach to digital data makes it easier: Tobias Adielsson, a crime expert, says criminals can easily find out “where I live, my phone number, the model of my car, even whether I have a dog”. They scrape public data to identify fast-growing companies, then threaten the owners.

Police have arrested dozens of suspects recently, but say the supply is “inexhaustible”. Gangs used to recruit on football pitches; now they do so online. Fifteen-year-olds at one Stockholm high school speak of “million-krona” ($94,000) bombing jobs posted on Telegram and Snapchat.

The violence has added fuel to an already fierce immigration debate in Sweden. In 2024 the proportion of foreign-born people living in the country stood at around 20% of its population. In September the national police chief, Petra Lundh, warned that mass migration and failed integration policies were at the root of serious gang crime. Though there is much debate over the figures, data suggests she may be right. First and second-generation migrants are over-represented in violent-crime figures, and a recent police survey found that around 600 mid- and high-tier gang members were running criminal operations in Sweden from abroad.

Meanwhile businesses are spending ever more on safety. Sales of reinforced doors doubled in January, says Prodoor, a security-door firm. ”Four in ten companies we talk to don’t file police reports,” says Mr Adielsson, the crime expert. “They don’t believe that anyone is going to come.” ■

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