Is Sweden A Failed State?

Authored by Judith Bergamn via The Gatestone Institute,

• The Swedish state, in true Orwellian style, fights those Swedish citizens who point out the obvious problems that migrants are causing.


• When police officer Peter Springare said in February that migrants were committing a disproportionate amount of crime in the suburbs, he was investigated for inciting "racial hatred".


• Currently, a 70-year-old Swedish pensioner is being prosecuted for "hate speech", for writing on Facebook that migrants "set fire to cars, and urinate and defecate on the streets".

The security situation in Sweden is now so critical that the national police chief, Dan Eliasson, has asked the public for help; the police are unable to solve the problems on their own. In June, the Swedish police released a new report, "Utsatta områden 2017", ("Vulnerable Areas 2017", commonly known as "no-go zones" or lawless areas). It shows that the 55 no-go zones of a year ago are now 61.

In September 2016, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven and Minister of Interior Anders Ygeman refused to see the warnings: in 2015, only 14% of all crimes in Sweden were solved, and in 2016, 80% of police officers were allegedly considering quitting the force. Both ministers refused to call it a crisis. According to Anders Ygeman:

"... we are in a very difficult position, but crisis is something completely different. ...we are in a very strained position and this is because we have done the biggest reorganization since the 1960s, while we have these very difficult external factors with the highest refugee reception since the Second World War. We have border controls for the first time in 20 years, and an increased terrorist threat".

A year later the Swedish national police chief is calling the situation "acute".

In 2015, only 14% of all crimes in Sweden were solved. In 2016, 80% of police officers were allegedly considering quitting the force. Nonetheless, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven (pictured above) refused to call it a crisis. (Photo by Michael Campanella/Getty Images)

Sweden increasingly resembles a failed state: In the 61 "no-go zones", there are 200 criminal networks with an estimated 5,000 criminals who are members. Twenty-three of those no-go zones are especially critical: children as young as 10 years old are involved in serious crimes there, including weapons and drugs, and are literally being trained to become hardened criminals.

The trouble, however, extends beyond organized crime. In June, Swedish police in the city of Trollhättan, during a riot in the Kronogården suburb, were attacked by approximately a hundred masked migrant youths, mainly Somalis. The rioting continued for two nights.

Violent riots, however, are just part of Sweden"s security problems. In 2010, according to the government, there were "only" 200 radical Islamists in Sweden. In June, the head of the Swedish Security Service (Säpo), Anders Thornberg, told the Swedish media that the country is experiencing a "historical" challenge in having to deal with thousands of "radical Islamists in Sweden". The jihadists and jihadist supporters are mainly concentrated in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö and Örebro, according to Säpo. "This is the "new normal" ... It is an historic challenge that extremist circles are growing," Thornberg said.

The Swedish establishment has only itself to blame for it.

Thornberg said that Säpo now receives around 6,000 intelligence tips a month concerning terrorism and extremism, compared to an average of 2,000 a month in 2012.

Some of the reasons for the increase, according to terror expert Magnus Ranstorp of the Swedish Defense University, is due to segregation in Sweden"s no-go zones:

"... it has been easy for extremists to recruit undisturbed in those areas. ...the prevention measures have been pretty tame... if you compare Denmark and Sweden, Denmark is at university level and Sweden at kindergarten level".

Asked what the increase in people supporting extremist ideologies indicated about Sweden"s work to combat radicalism, Interior Minister Anders Ygeman told the Swedish news outlet TT:

"I think it says little. This is a development we have seen in a number of countries in Europe. On the other hand, it shows that it was right to take those measures we have. A permanent centre against violent extremism, that we have increased the budget to work against violent extremism, that we have increased the security police"s budget for three years."

There may be even more jihadists than Säpo thinks. In 2015, at the height of the migrant crisis, when Sweden received over 160,000 migrants, 14,000 of them who were told that they were going to be deported disappeared inside Sweden without a trace. As late as April 2017, Sweden was still looking for 10,000 of them. Sweden, however, has only 200 border police staff at its disposal to look for them. One "disappeared migrant" was Rakhmat Akilov, from Uzbekistan. He drove a truck into a department store in Stockholm, killing four people and wounding many others. He later said he did it for the Islamic State (ISIS).

Meanwhile, Sweden continues to receive returning ISIS fighters from Syria, a courtesy that hardly improves the security situation. Sweden, so far, has received 150 returning ISIS fighters. There are still 112 who remain abroad -- considered the most hardcore of all -- and Sweden expects many of those to return as well. Astonishingly, the Swedish government has given several of the ISIS returnees protected identities to prevent local Swedes from finding out who they are. Two Swedish ISIS fighters who returned to Europe, Osama Krayem and Mohamed Belkaid, went on to help commit the terror attacks at Brussels airport and the Maelbeek metro station in the center of Brussels, on March 22, 2016. Thirty-one people were killed; 300 were wounded.

Swedish news outlets have reported that the Swedish towns that receive the returnees do not even know they are returning ISIS fighters. One coordinator of the work against violent Islamist extremism in Stockholm, Christina Kiernan, says that "...at the moment there is no control over those returning from ISIS-controlled areas in the Middle East".

Kiernan explains that there are rules that prevent the passing of information about returning jihadists from Säpo to the local municipalities, so that the people who are in charge in the municipal authorities, including the police, have no information about who and how many returned ISIS fighters there are in their area. It is therefore impossible to monitor them -- and this at a time when Säpo estimates the number of violent Islamist extremists in Sweden in the thousands.

Even after all this, the Swedish state, in true Orwellian style, fights those Swedish citizens who point out the obvious problems that migrants are causing. When police officer Peter Springare said in February that migrants were committing a disproportionate amount of crime in the suburbs, he was investigated for inciting "racial hatred".

Currently, a 70-year-old Swedish pensioner is being prosecuted for "hate speech", for writing on Facebook that migrants "set fire to cars, and urinate and defecate on the streets".

With thousands of jihadists all over Sweden, what could be more important than prosecuting a Swedish pensioner for writing on Facebook?

Sweden Truck Terrorist Arrested; Bomb Found Inside Truck

Swedish police have arrested the man they accuse of plowing a hijacked beer delivery truck into a crowd in central Stockholm on Friday, killing four people and wounding more than a dozen in what they called a terror crime.

After a five-hour manhunt on Friday, Swedish police apprehended the man who matched the profile of a person seen leaving the crime scene, but cautioned they had yet to ascertain whether he was the suspected perpetrator. Magistrates have until Tuesday to decide whether the suspect should remain in custody, and specify charges. “He is suspected of conducting an act of terror,” Swedish prosecutors’ spokeswoman Karin Rosander said.

Police in central Stockholm near the crime scene on April 08, 2017

"The person in question has been arrested as the culprit ... in this case the driver," police spokesman Lars Bystrom said of the attack, adding that the authorities were not ruling out the possibility that he had accomplices, although only one person had been taken into custody.

While police declined to comment on the identity or possible motive of the man, who was detained in a northern Stockholm suburb, the arrested suspect comes from Uzbekistan and is 39 years old, investigators said at a press conference. He was described as “a marginal character,” previously named in “security information” but not under any recent investigation. Officials did not provide any further information on the suspect’s identity or how he got into the country.

Police declined to comment on an earlier report by public broadcaster SVT that a bag containing a home-made bomb had been found in the truck used in Friday’s attack in Stockholm, but said that some sort of “technical device that should not be there” was uncovered from the driver’s seat. Investigators are not yet able to determine the nature of the device.

The Stockholm attack bears “clear similarities” to the March 22 Westminster attack in London, officials said at the press conference. Officials did not comment on reports of the suspect’s alleged links to Islamic State, but stated that the investigation team is screening phones and other electronic devices in his possession to check for possible links and potential accomplices. The officials did not make any comments on the matter, but stressed that they were in an “intensive part of investigation.”

People gather near the crime scene, near Ahlens department store on April 8, 2017,
the day after a hijacked beer truck plowed into pedestrians in central Stockholm

The attack might have long-term consequences as the authorities “cannot rule out that there are people who can be inspired by this,” said Jonas Hysing from Sweden’s National Tactical Council (NTR). “The main goal of the Security Service is to prevent future attacks and to find possible accomplices,” head of the Security Service Anders Thornberg said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack and police said security at Sweden"s borders had been heightened and traffic restricted on the Oresund Bridge linking Denmark and Sweden.

The attack stunned Sweden, which has so far been largely immune from any major incidents of this kind. "I think it was just a matter of time, but still one doesn"t think it will happen," Cecilia Hansson, a 25 year-old nurse, said. "It"s still unreal when it happens this close."

As reported yesterday, the rampage took place on Friday afternoon, when a man hijacked a beer-delivery truck, and drove an estimated 500 yards through the crowded Drottninggatan pedestrian shopping street. The beer truck ploughed through crowds before ramming into the Ahlens department store. The driver escaped in the ensuing chaos, with people fleeing from the area.

As the WSJ notes, local authorities in the capital, where flags flew at half mast on buildings including the parliament and royal palace, said that 10 people including a child were still being treated in hospital on Saturday. Two adults were in intensive care.

The incident, which came a day after Sweden’s police, military and security services jointly practiced their terror-response capabilities, underscored the formidable security challenge posed by isolated attackers turning vehicles into weapons. It was the fourth major attack in Europe in less than a year in which a vehicle appeared to be used as a weapon of terror. In July, an attacker in Nice, France, plowed into revelers celebrating Bastille Day, killing 86.

According to Reuters, the attack was the latest to hit the Nordic region after shootings in the Danish capital Copenhagen killed three people in 2015 and put the country on high alert and the 2011 bombing and shooting by far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik that killed 77 people in Norway. Although Sweden has not seen a large-scale attack, a failed suicide bombing in December 2010 killed an attacker only a few hundred yards from the site of Friday"s incident.

Swedish police said it was especially difficult to identify "lone wolf" attackers in an open, Nordic society. "It is very hard if it is a single individual who is not part of a wider conspiracy or a more organized planning," Anders Thornberg, head of the Sapo security police, told Swedish radio. "But we have to find these individuals as well."

Police in Norway"s largest cities and at Oslo airport will carry weapons until further notice following the attack.