STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Denmark will put pressure on Sweden to contain growing cross-border gang violence, including armed Swedish teenagers acting as “child soldiers” in turf wars, the Danish justice minister said on Monday.
Denmark has seen a rise in violence on its soil by Swedish gang members in recent months and says the trend is a spillover from its northern neighbour which has by far the highest per capita rate of gun violence in the European Union.
Danish police last week began a more active monitoring of passengers arriving by train from Sweden and the government on Monday said it aims to introduce facial recognition technology to speed up investigations that are currently done manually.
“We will of course also put pressure on Sweden to take responsibility for these things,” Minister of Justice Peter Hummelgaard told Danish TV2.
Swedish gang members involved in the violence will also face severe consequences, Denmark’s national chief of police said.
“There will be a price to pay and it will be high,” Thorkild Fogde told a press conference in Copenhagen.
The Swedish justice ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sweden has about 14,000 active gang criminals and an additional 48,000 people loosely affiliated with gangs, according to a police report last year.
According to EU statistics agency Eurostat, 25 people aged 15-24 were killed by gun violence in Sweden in 2021, second in the EU only to France, which had 40 such deaths across a population six times the size of Sweden’s.
(Reporting by Johan Ahlander and Terje Solsvik; Editing by Toby Chopra)
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