By Patrick Norén
Sweden averaged over one explosion per day in January 2025, marking a disturbing new high for the country once renowned for being quiet, peaceful, and safe.
On November 12, 2019, the BBC published an article entitled, “Sweden’s 100 explosions this year: what’s going on?”. At the time, the author described the 97 attacks in the first nine months of the year as “unprecedented”. Five years later, however, Sweden’s problem with explosive attacks has ballooned to a level far exceeding what it once was, leading us to ask the same question again: what is going on?
It is important to recognize that statistics vary, and there are very often discrepancies between the data supplied by the Swedish Police and SVT, the country’s national TV and radio broadcaster. According to the Swedish Police, the number of explosions in December 2024 totaled 22. However, SVT put this number at 27. For January 2025, SVT reports that Sweden saw 32 explosions, putting the Nordic country on course for its worst year ever for explosive attacks.
There were three separate explosions just on the night of January 23 alone, in Uppsala, Haninge, and Stockholm. This was followed by two more explosions on the night of January 24, in Malmö and Eskilstuna. Or, to put it a different way, in a country of only 10.5m people, there were five explosions in five different towns and cities across two nights.
Even the night after I started researching this article, from January 27 to the morning of January 28, there were three more explosions across Sweden: two in southern Stockholm and one in Ödåkra near Helsingborg.
Data supplied by the Swedish Police since 2018 reveals a startling rise in the number of explosive detonations, attempts, and preparations in recent years, seriously calling into question to what extent Sweden remains the relatively safe and peaceful country that made it the envy of many across the world.
As can be seen in the graph below compiled using data from the Swedish Police, explosive incidents rose between 2018 and 2019, dipped during the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2022, before increasing sharply in 2023 and 2024.

Means, Motives, Opportunities
It has long been widely acknowledged that the bomb attacks and shootings – of which Sweden has one of the highest rates in Europe – are linked to gang violence and drug trafficking. In an interview with SVT in January 2025, Erik Lindblad said that they had seen an increase in what he termed “instrumental violence” where it is not people that are targeted but instead “fixed objects such as staircases and businesses”.
The reasons for the bombings are, in several cases, “suspected to be motivated by extortion against businesses or people linked to businesses and their families”, according to the Swedish authorities’ crisis information website. Mr. Lindblad also noted that the attacks can often be part of wider criminal conflicts, although these cases are often an exception to the rule, in their opinion.
Serious crime and the actors within those networks are often behind the attacks, according to Mr. Lindblad. “They use violence to get their way, irrespective of if it is revenge, or a battle over a drugs market, or extortion,” he said.
Thankfully, given that the explosions normally target doors, staircases, or businesses, the explosions do not always result in injuries and rarely kill people. Nevertheless, two were injured in an explosion in southern Stockholm early on January 18, two were injured in an explosion in the Stockholm suburb of Farsta on January 24, while one man was injured by a blast in the early hours of January 27 while he was sleeping in the town of Upplands-Bro, north-west of Stockholm.
Most famously, however, a 24-year-old newly qualified teacher, Soha Saad, was killed by an explosion in September 2023 as she slept on her sofa in her home in Fullerö, near the city of Uppsala. Reports from the time said that she could have been neighbors with a relative of a gang member, but she was innocent, had no connections to gang violence, and was likely not the intended target.
In November last year, five people were sentenced to prison for crimes related to three explosions in September 2023 including the one that killed Soha Saad. Two were sentenced to life in prison, and the prosecutor Thomas Bälter had previously said that there was a “clear link” between the attacks and a conflict within the Foxtrot criminal network.
Hand grenades, powerful pyrotechnics, or fireworks are being “increasingly used” for such attacks. While fireworks can be obtained fairly easily and dynamite can be stolen from building sites, hand grenades are a frequently preferred modus operandi as they come pre-assembled, are smuggled into Sweden – often from the Balkans – by gangs, and are used to injure and intimidate rivals when the supply of other explosives and the knowledge to weaponize them has decreased thanks to successful prosecutions of known bomb makers.

Open Addresses and Open Borders
Sweden has long taken pride in leading much of the world on many metrics such as democracy, education, equality, living standards, crime, and press freedom. However, this has not come without vulnerabilities exploited by violent gangs that the Swedish state is struggling to deal with.
To begin with, Sweden was the first country in the world to pass a law on the freedom of the press in 1766, and this law in its present-day form constitutes one of the four fundamental laws that make up the country’s constitution. This law also entitles everyone to “have free access to official documents, in order to encourage the free exchange of opinion, the availability of comprehensive information and freedom of artistic creation”. This includes granting open access to people’s addresses, thus making tracking down where a potential victim lives little more complicated than a quick internet search.
The constitution does give certain restrictions on public access to official documents, including in “the interests of preventing or prosecuting crime” and for “the protection of the personal or economic circumstances of individuals”. It is possible to request to be removed from open-access records, and in 2023 the Swedish tax office saw a “big increase” in relatives of criminals asking for their details to be removed to protect themselves from a potential attack.
A second reason that many consider as contributing to the rise in criminal violence in Sweden, is immigration. The country had long taken great pride in an open-door immigration policy, and neither keeps records nor releases statistics on people’s ethnicity, including criminals.
The defenders of Sweden’s once generous immigration policy will point out that, according to a report released in February 2024, 88% of the 14,000 people deemed to be active in criminal networks are Swedish citizens, and only 8% of these are dual citizens. 11% are non-citizens, and the remaining 1% was not known. An additional 48,000 people in Sweden were deemed to be linked to criminal networks, although not actively involved.
However, notwithstanding the absence of official statistics linking ethnicity and crime, and other potential contributing factors such as poverty, inequality, and unemployment, the fact that many bomb attacks and gun violence in Sweden occur in “vulnerable” areas with large second and third generation immigrant populations is not lost on many Swedes anxious about the startling rise in organized violent crime.

Diplomatic Difficulties
Sweden’s problem with violent organized crime has become so serious that it has spilled over into its neighbors. Three Swedes were arrested in February 2024 on suspicion of involvement in a bombing in the Norwegian town of Drøbak in October of the previous year.
On August 6, there was an explosion at a convenience store in Copenhagen after an object was thrown inside, and two Swedish citizens were arrested by police in Sweden shortly after. Then, two weeks later, another Swedish citizen in possession of two hand grenades was arrested in Denmark on suspicion of having been recruited to commit crimes on Danish soil. In the beginning of October, three Swedish men were arrested on suspicion of having thrown hand grenades at the Israeli embassy in Copenhagen.
In August 2024, the Danish Minister of Justice Peter Hummelgaard said that Danish criminal groups had hired Swedish “child soldiers” to commit crimes in Denmark no fewer than 25 times since April. Alongside implementing tighter checks on arrivals from Sweden, Hummelgaard also said that they will “of course put pressure on Sweden to take responsibility for these things”.
Furthermore, following a meeting between the Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and his Danish counterpart Mette Fredrickson in October about what could be done to tackle cross-border crime, the latter was unflinching in her diagnosis of the problem.
“There is unfortunately a very close relationship between foreign policy and criminalization today. Because when we look at organised crime, when we look at violence, when we look at drugs, then there is an overrepresentation in Denmark and in Sweden, especially with young men from non-Western backgrounds. And it is unsustainable.”

What is Sweden Doing?
While gang-related shootings decreased by 20% last year compared to 2023, Stockholm faces a huge challenge in putting a stop to the explosions that have been rocking Sweden on an almost daily basis since the turn of the year.
That said, what is particularly odd is that gang-related explosions have been a well-documented problem for several years, and yet the problem has become so bad that Sweden’s Minister of Justice, Gunnar Strömmer, has said that “this is a situation that no decent society can accept.”
The legal policy spokesperson of the Social Democratic party, Teresa Carvalho, has said that “we find ourselves in a national crisis”, while even the Swedish Police has described the situation as a “catastrophe” and even Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has called the spate of bombings “domestic terrorism” and has admitted that “it’s abundantly clear that we do not have control over this wave of violence; otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.”
Sweden has adopted its first ever national strategy against organized crime. Recognizing that “organized crime has spread throughout Sweden for far too long”, that “society’s resistance against organized crime must be fundamentally strengthened”, and that Sweden’s international reputation is also at stake, the national strategy names five strategic objectives to tackle the phenomenon, namely: stop criminal careers, reduce the supply of illegal firearms and explosives, destroy the criminal economy, build robustness against unlawful and undue influence, and safeguard systems for reliable identification and an efficient provision of information.
Sweden is also discussing whether to reduce the age of criminal responsibility for serious crimes from 15 to 14 years old, however only for a period of five years. After all, those carrying out these attacks are very often minors, often boys from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are hired by gangs to do their dirty work. It is not yet clear whether the reduction in the age of criminal responsibility for serious crime will materialize as not all political parties would support such a measure.

So What is Going On?
Swedes are understandably worried about the increasingly frequent bombings, especially those that live in the worst affected areas. Politicians and the police recognize that Sweden is in a state of crisis over the bombings, and things are moving quickly.
On January 29, the Deputy Chief of Stockholm South police district, Max Åkervall, revealed that they had arrested a bomb maker whom they believed had played significant role in the most recent attacks. Speaking to SVT, he confirmed that the current spate of explosions could be roughly categorized as either being part of “significant” ongoing power struggles between criminal networks, or a “sharp increase” in extortion cases.
In the absence of a drastic reduction in the frequency of attacks across its towns and cities, Sweden could well see over 300 bombings in 2025, over double the 2023 record of 149. It is not only innocent citizens that are vulnerable to the violence, however. As even the government admits, Sweden’s world-renowned reputation as a relatively quiet, peaceful, and prosperous country is at stake.
Patrick Norén is the Editor of CBNW Magazine.