The words ‘Sweden has fallen’ appeared many times on social media over the last two days as the country faced a mass school shooting, an act of evil criminality once unknown in this gentle and liberal paradise.
A gunman with a ‘spray and pray’ style automatic weapon, designed to cause maximum damage in the shortest time, turned it on students, leaving them mortally wounded and injured.
The world watched aghast. ‘Oh, Sweden, what have you done?’ another internet commentator said, echoing the private thoughts of many, whatever their political views.
The gunman, who killed 10 people at a school that offers classes for immigrants in the city of Orebro to the west of Stockholm, shouted ‘you should go away from Europe’ as he launched the attack.
He was named as 35-year-old Rickard Andersson, an unemployed recluse who lived in the city, and was also reportedly found dead at the scene when police arrived, having turned his hunting rifle on himself.
None of his victims has yet been officially identified but the Syrian embassy confirmed its own citizens are among them, and the massacre appears to have been a premeditated attack on migrants in a multi-cultural country divided by racial discord.
Only last week, an Iraqi Christian, Salwan Momika, was shot dead in Stockholm after he sparked outrage among left wingers and Islamic hardliners by burning the Koran in public.
I was there in Sweden when it happened, witness to yet another bleak staging post in the country’s deeply troubled journey as it confronts its decision in 2015 to open its borders to all who knocked.
Rickard Andersson, 35, is suspected of having carried out a mass murder at Campus Risbergska in Örebro earlier this week
The shooting comes after Iraqi Christian, Salwan Momika, was shot dead in Stockholm after he sparked outrage among left wingers and Islamic hardliners by burning the Koran in public
Terrifying footage captured the moment the Swedish school shooter paced the corridors of the building before his deadly rampage
I have visited Sweden many times since it generously welcomed 163,000 people claiming sanctuary that year during the migrant crisis that was sweeping Europe.
I also walked into Berlin that autumn alongside the first Syrian men hoping to make Germany their home.
I saw Greek islands struggling to cope with the numbers arriving on their shores to travel northwards for a new life.
But of all the sights I witnessed, none shocked me more than in Malmö, Sweden’s second city, on a freezing cold morning with snow on the ground.
As the Swedes struggled to get on and off trams to work in the icy conditions, a warm shopping mall was chock-full of young men who watched them go by.
The foreigners laughed and jostled each other, only occasionally going outside to light a cigarette, then throw away the butt, which was duly swept up by a street cleaner. ‘It is my job,’ he shrugged to me in faltering English. ‘They know no better now. We hope they will learn.’
I hoped so too. But it didn’t work out that way. Some of the newcomers stubbornly clung to their own cultures — even, we now know, appearing to reject that of the country that had made them welcome.
Sweden, which once boasted Europe’s lowest crime rate, is facing mass murders, gun warfare, drug trading, daily bombings, illegal prostitution rackets and a rape epidemic.
The suspect was described as a loner with an ‘extreme social phobia’
A man lights a candle near the Campus Risbergska school, following a deadly shooting attack at the adult education center in Orebro, Sweden, February 5, 2025
Forensic investigators are seen at the scene of a shooting overnight
Sweden’s King Carl Gustaf and Queen Silvia, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson with his wife Birgitta Ed visit the memorial site where mourners placed candles and flowers outside Campus Risbergska School, the day after the school shooting at Risbergska school in Orebro, Sweden
King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden (2n L) and Sweden’s Queen Silvia (L) lay flowers the memorial outside the adult education center Campus Risbergska school in Orebro, Sweden, on February 5
King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden (L) and Sweden’s Queen Silvia light a candle at the memorial service in the Saint Nicholas church in Orebro, Sweden
Emergency personnel gather after a shooting at Risbergska School in Orebro, Sweden, 04 February 2025
Much of this criminality is blamed by the center-right government on gangs disproportionately made up of first-generation migrants.
A 2023 police report said there are 14,000 active gang members in Sweden, some children of nine or ten, with a further 48,000 people ‘affiliated’ to them.
In 2024, there were 124 explosions (linked, it is thought, to gangland turf wars) across the country. In the first 30 days of this year, in Stockholm and other towns, there were 30, leaving buildings burning and collapsing as fire brigades struggled to cope.
Stockholm’s per-capita murder rate is roughly 30 times that of London. Half the suspects are aged between 15 and 20, amid a huge demographic shift that has upended this hitherto peaceful Christian nation.
Between 2002 and 2023, the share of the Swedish population that was either foreign-born or had at least one foreign-born parent increased from 21 per cent to 35 per cent, according to a recent official report by the government agency Sweden Statistics (SCB).
And that percentage is expected to rise, as migrants have large families (aided by a generous refugee welfare package), while Swedish parents often only produce one or two.
Two years ago, I went to report on a shooting that had killed and injured mothers and children in a playground on a summer afternoon.
The rival teenage gangs shot at each other, and the victims in between were caught in the crossfire.
Police officers work at the scene of the Risbergska School in Orebro, Sweden
Emergency services at the scene of an incident at Risbergska School
Police special forces are seen leaving the scene of the Risbergska School in Orebro, Sweden
Shots were reported at Risbergska School in Örebro’s Västhaga district
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A hijabed mother called Fatima, who showed me footage the horror on her smartphone, said that the youngsters were out of control, refused to attend school and spoke only Arabic even though they could not remember their native countries, as they had arrived as three-year-olds.
I spoke to the headmistress of the local secondary school. ‘We give these children from migrant families special attention. They learn in small classes of ten. We want them to become Swedes.
But the lure of the gangs means they stop coming at 12 or even 11. They would rather be gun or drug runners in exchange for a designer jacket or hoodie. They are lost to us.’
There’s no doubt that Sweden is fighting back. Deportations of migrant criminals are happening (although slowly). And, for all that, I have met Bosnian Muslim asylum seekers in Sweden who came before 2015 and assimilated into the country happily.
Their children have become pillars of society: politicians, doctors, business-people. One I spoke to twice during the week Queen Elizabeth died told me: ‘She was our Queen too.’
He added: ‘But Sweden was naive in 2015 to let so many in. Few questions were asked about who they were or what their demands of Sweden would be.’
I realised this as I drove past a bus stop outside a remote Swedish town in 2016. Three men and a child were standing there: we reversed and offered them a lift.
‘We were put in a Christian-run charity house,’ said the four Iraqi refugees, one a child. ‘They said your kind of prayers at the table and gave us pasta and not rice, which we like. We have walked out and want a hotel.’
Anti-Islamist activist Salwan Momika burns a koran and covers it with bacon at the Stockholm mosque on June 28, 2023 in Stockholm, Sweden. He was shot dead last week
Police pictured outside the apartment where the shooting of Momika took place. Sweden, which once boasted Europe’s lowest crime rate , is facing a crime epidemic, writes Sue Reid
The group, in Sweden for six weeks, asked to be dropped off at an asylum advice center that had been established in the town. ‘We want to live with our own people and have our own customs,’ they said after posing for a photograph which the Mail published.
I have always wondered what happened to this ungrateful quartet or what they later gave to Sweden in exchange for the generosity they had been offered from a new country.
And it is a question that many Swedes (and older migrants like my Bosnian friend) are asking too.
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Publish date : 2025-02-06 07:34:00
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