A 13-year-old boy found dead in woods near his home in the suburbs of Stockholm was the latest victim of a deadly gang war in Sweden, a prosecutor has said.
Milo, who was only identified by his first name, was shot in the head in a chilling example of “gross and completely reckless gang violence”, prosecutor Lisa dos Santos said.
The boy is believed to have been shot in Haninge, south of Stockholm.
Ms dos Santos declined to give further details due to an ongoing investigation.
Swedish media, which have published photos of Milo with the permission of his family, said he was moved to the woods after being killed.
He was not known to police and was reported missing on September 8 before his body was found by a passerby three days later.
Crime gangs have become a growing problem in Sweden, with an increasing number of drive-by shootings, bombings and grenade attacks.
Most of the violence is in Sweden’s three largest cities – Stockholm, Goteborg and Malmo.
As of September 15, police had counted 261 shootings in Sweden this year, of which 34 were deadly and 71 people were wounded.
In September alone, the Scandinavian country saw four shootings, three of them fatal, in Uppsala, west of Stockholm, and in the Swedish capital.
One of the victims was Milo.
In June, a man with an automatic weapon opened fire in the early morning outside the entrance to a subway station in Farsta, a suburb south of Sweden’s capital, and hit four people.
A 15-year-old boy died of his wounds shortly after, with the second victim, a 43-year-old man, dying later.
Two men in their 20s were later arrested on suspicion of murder and attempted murder.
Sweden’s justice minister Gunnar Strommer said at the time that more than 20 shots had been fired and described the shooting as “domestic terrorism”.
The violence is said to be fuelled by a feud between a dual Turkish-Swedish man who lives in Turkey and his former lieutenant whose mother, a woman in her 60s, was shot on September 7 and later died of her wounds.
Sweden’s centre-right government has been tightening laws to tackle gang-related crime, while the head of Sweden’s police said earlier this month that warring gangs have brought an “unprecedented” wave of violence to the Scandinavian country.
“Several boys aged between 13 and 15 have been killed, the mother of a criminal was executed at home, and a young man in Uppsala was shot dead on his way to work,” police chief Anders Thornberg told a press conference on September 13.
He estimated that some 13,000 people are linked to Sweden’s criminal underworld.
Swedish police said that, “seen from the criminals’ point of view, there are several advantages to recruiting young people. A child is not controlled by the police in the same way as an adult. Nor can a child be convicted of a crime. A young person can also be easier to influence and exploit”.
