A 13-year-old girl is suspected of throwing a live hand grenade at a restaurant in central Malmö on May Day, Swedish prosecutors have confirmed, in the latest shocking example of criminal networks using children as foot soldiers.
The grenade landed on one of the city’s busiest streets on 1 May as thousands gathered for traditional demonstrations. It failed to explode immediately. Police later carried out a controlled detonation that sent a plume of smoke across the area near buses and shops. A city bus is reported to have driven over the device before bomb technicians arrived. No one was injured.
Because the girl was under Sweden’s age of criminal responsibility of 15, she cannot be prosecuted ordinarily. Instead, she faces a special court process known as a bevistalan. A 21-year-old woman with previous convictions, time in care homes and links to organised crime has been charged in connection with the attack and is accused of involving a minor.
The case is grimly familiar. Swedish gangs have repeatedly recruited children to carry out shootings and grenade attacks precisely because they cannot be jailed. In November 2025 a 13-year-old boy was identified after another grenade exploded outside a Malmö apartment block. Other recent cases have involved 12- and 13-year-old girls in arson attacks.
A city transformed
Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city and gateway from Denmark, has become a symbol of the country’s struggle with gang violence. Police recorded 26 explosions in the city in 2025, up from 16 the year before. Nationally, Sweden logged 189 explosions in 2025 even as fatal shootings fell from their 2022 peak. Hand grenades, often old Yugoslav-era stock, have become a favoured weapon in tit-for-tat gang wars over drugs and status.
Nearly half of Malmö’s population of about 368,000 now has a foreign background, either born abroad or born in Sweden to two foreign-born parents, compared with a national figure of around 28 per cent. Foreign-born residents make up 36 per cent of the city. The largest groups include people from Iraq, Syria, former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Somalia. Districts such as Rosengård are classified by police as “particularly vulnerable”, meaning criminal networks exert strong influence and residents are often reluctant to speak to police.
Official crime statistics show a clear over-representation. People born abroad are registered as crime suspects at roughly 2.5 times the rate of Swedes born to two Swedish-born parents. Those born in Sweden to two foreign-born parents show an even higher relative risk in some studies. The gap narrows after adjustments for age, sex and poverty, but does not disappear. In homicides tied to criminal networks, the over-representation is far sharper: around 80 per cent of victims and 64 per cent of perpetrators have a foreign background.
How Sweden got here
Sweden ran one of Europe’s most generous asylum systems for years. In 2015 alone it received more than 160,000 asylum applications, a huge number for a country of then 10 million. Many newcomers settled in already deprived suburban estates. Integration lagged. Unemployment, school failure and parallel social structures followed in some areas. Critics argue the scale and speed of arrivals, combined with weak enforcement and a welfare model that made it easy for criminal networks to embed, created the conditions for today’s gangs.
Successive governments tightened rules after 2015 and again after the 2022 change of government. Asylum numbers have since dropped sharply. Shootings have also declined thanks to tougher policing, preventive wiretaps and new laws allowing exclusion orders from certain neighbourhoods. Explosions, however, remain stubbornly high. Police estimate some 17,500 people are active in criminal networks nationwide.
Islamist terrorism has been a separate but overlapping concern. Around 300 people left Sweden to join ISIS and similar groups in Syria and Iraq. The 2017 Stockholm truck attack that killed five was carried out by a rejected Uzbek asylum seeker who pledged allegiance to Islamic State. Security services still assess the Islamist threat as elevated, though most recent gang violence is driven by organised crime rather than ideology.
Police insist there are no “no-go zones”, only “vulnerable areas”. Residents of Rosengård and similar districts report mixed experiences: some say everyday life has improved, others still describe intimidation and recruitment of teenagers. What is not in dispute is that a 13-year-old girl was allegedly sent to throw a grenade on a crowded city street on a public holiday, and that this has become a recurring feature of life in parts of Sweden.
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