The CHILD killers as young as ELEVEN carry out machine gun murders on the streets of Sweden for up to £13,000 per hit… and CANNOT be prosecuted

Swedish gangs are increasingly recruiting children to carry out contract killings, authorities warn, as the country has been engulfed by a “gig economy of gang violence” in recent months.

The Scandinavian country has the highest rate of gun violence in the EU, while the number of homicides involving children has more than tripled from 31 counts in the first eight months of 2023 to 102 in the same period this year, according to authorities.

Young people are being lured by recruiters on social media platforms such as Snapchat and Telegram, with group chats titled ‘bombing today’ and ‘who wants to shoot someone in Stockholm’ reportedly attracting thousands of members.

The children – who are often vulnerable and from poor backgrounds – are promised quick cash, with bounties of up to £13,000 for a successful hit.

Once signed up, the young recruits do the gang bosses’ dirty work, killing relatives of rival gangsters and other targets, often without ever meeting the person who orders the killing.

Crime bosses are increasingly looking for children under the age of 15, because police in Sweden say they are too young to be prosecuted. A boy of just 11 years old is believed to be involved in a recent case.

Children traveling across the country to commit the crimes for cash will become “the new normal,” Erik Lindblad, head of the police’s gang violence task force, warned last month.

He said online chat groups were advertising jobs for “tens of thousands” of young members and inviting them to volunteer to carry out an attack.

Gangs have increasingly sought out young girls and children with intellectual disabilities to carry out the killings, believing they are less likely to be suspected by their targets.

They deliberately hire children because Swedish law stipulates that young people under the age of 15 cannot be prosecuted, a law that critics say urgently needs to be reformed.

Faced with the increased involvement of young people in violent gang crime, prosecutors are increasingly calling for prison sentences instead of ‘closed care’ for underage suspects, according to Swedish media.

Three teenagers were convicted after a man was murdered while eating at a restaurant south of Stockholm in March. The 17-year-old, who was believed to have fired the fatal shot, was given a prison sentence instead of juvenile detention.

The teenager, who is believed to have used an automatic weapon, was jailed for eight years, while a 19-year-old man was jailed for life. 16-year-old accomplice placed in closed care.

According to prosecutor Niksa Lucic, the circumstances of the murder indicate that it took place in the context of a gang.

In August, a 16-year-old boy was arrested after shots were fired at the door of an apartment near Stockholm.

He was charged last month with attempted murder and serious weapons offenses after a preliminary police investigation revealed he had been attacked by an ‘anonymous client’.

They say he accepted the contract for 65,000 Swedish kronor (£4,600) and told a friend on Instagram: ‘I just want to kill someone – I don’t care who it is’.

Carin Götblad, Stockholm police chief at the National Operations Department, said The Telegraph that child suspects often show no remorse for their actions.

“The researchers tell me that some of them are very calm, they don’t cry, they don’t say anything or ‘no comment.’ They have a complete lack of empathy,” she said.

‘Some people say, ‘They don’t understand what they’ve done.’ They may not fully understand the consequences of what they have done, but when you are fourteen years old and you shoot someone in the head, you understand that this man is dead.”

Dramatic video obtained by MailOnline last year shows a teenager armed with an AK-47 spraying bullets into the home of a terrified mother and her young child in a Stockholm suburb.

The flat is the home of the ex-girlfriend of a famous rapper and the attack is said to have been a deterrent tactic.

A scared mother, who lives on the block, told MailOnline at the time: ‘It was crazy. It wasn’t a small gun. It was a Kalashnikov. It’s terrible that these types of attacks are becoming normalized.’

In another case that sent shockwaves through Sweden, a two-year-old girl was shot in the stomach by her cuddly toy Winne the Pooh, while her father was killed and mother seriously injured by a 16-year-old gunman.

The horror attack, described by a lawyer as the most brutal case she had ever worked on, took place in October last year when the attacker broke into the family’s home in Stockholm’s Vastberga district.

A Swedish court heard how the teenage gunman shot the father at close range before pointing the automatic rifle at the mother, who was holding her two-year-old daughter in her arms.

“It’s so cruel you can hardly believe it,” said Swedish prosecutor Lisa dos Santos.

‘The father was shot while lying on the couch, the mother was shot in the back. She was a doctor, so she tried to save herself and the child, and they both survived. I would say it’s the worst thing I’ve ever experienced in my career.’

It later emerged that the killer had broken into the wrong house because his victims had the same last name as his intended target.

The next day, the same attacker committed another gruesome contract killing of two women – a 60-year-old grandmother and a 20-year-old – who were relatives of a rival gang member.

After he was arrested, a Swedish court gave the teenager a record prison sentence of 12 years.

Police have warned that the crime bosses who use young people to shed blood on their behalf are often abroad and can escape justice.

Task force leader Lindblad has urged social media companies to take action to police their platforms and push society to take such online activities more seriously.

“If a criminal had stood in a square and shouted to 10,000 children: ‘Murder, Malmö, 250,000 kroner, who will take that?’, I’m pretty sure society would have reacted,” he said , adding that police are working to have more of an online presence.

Last month, a Swedish teenager was arrested in Spain for allegedly running a gun rental service that used “child soldiers” in Sweden and Denmark.

The 14-year-old is said to have “played a key role” in recruiting, paying and instructing young people on how to carry out attacks via the messaging app Telegram, Spanish police said.

He also organized the deliveries of weapons and explosives, including assault rifles, it is claimed. One teenager was given an escape plan with an electric scooter.

The going rate for a murder would be between 20,000 and 50,000 euros.

The boy’s parents were also arrested and police said the family home in Alicante was being used as an ‘operations centre’.

Deadly violence linked to feuds between criminal gangs has escalated in recent years, with hundreds of shootings and several bombings.

In recent years, mafia groups abroad have dubbed Sweden a “haven” for their activities, while organized crime groups have infiltrated the business community and found ways to smuggle military-grade weapons into the country.

September 2023 was a particularly bloody month, with more than 40 violent episodes and 12 deaths in just 20 days – earning the nickname ‘Black September’.

In all of 2023, 53 people were killed in shootings across Sweden, home to about 10.5 million people.

In 2022, that figure was 62 – and the murder rate per capita in Stockholm was about 30 times higher than in London.

Gangsters carry out personal revenge attacks against each other – or hire young people to do the dirty work.

Nearly half of the suspects in gun-related murders in 2022 were between 15 and 20 years old: young people raised by gangs.

‘Kurdish Fox’, whose real name is Rawa Majid, became a household name in Sweden in 2022 when the feud between 38-year-old criminal network Foxtrot and the Dalen gang, led by Mikael ‘The Greek’ Tenezos, 25, spread fear in several cities as they fought for shares in the country’s highly lucrative drug market.

The two alleged kingpins have fled abroad and are now believed to be running their operations through intermediaries.