The murder of rapper Einár in Stockholm reveals Sweden’s ongoing crisis.
Eyewitnesses described the murder of the Swedish rap star Einár in Stockholm as an “execution at close range”. The 19-year-old, real name Nils Grönberg, died on Friday night as the most prominent victim of an increasingly brutal gang war in the Scandinavian country. Prime Minister Stefan Löfven expressed his dismay: “It is tragic that a young life has been wiped out again. I know that Einár is very important to many young people. “
What the public learned about the background of the crime with two perpetrators dressed in black and who had fled unrecognized does not really fit into the classification of “tragic”. According to the media, the rapper himself belonged to the Stockholm gang milieu and was involved in the gang conflicts, in the course of which a total of 169 people, almost always young men, were killed between 2018 and today.
Einár was about to appear in court as a witness. He had refused to work with the police after a gang known as the Vårby Network kidnapped him last year and asked for a ransom of three million kroner (300,000 euros). A bomb attack was planned against his house. One of the perpetrators convicted in the first instance is a prominent rapper colleague.
As a victim of the kidnapping, Einár refused to testify during the trial. For the upcoming appeal it was considered certain that the singer should be brought to court for the testimony. He has been temporarily arrested twice in the past few weeks, initially for resisting the police and then after being stabbed by a knife.
Gangs as perpetrators and victims
The first hit of the multiple Swedish Grammy award winning rapper was Einár’s homage to a killed gang boss. Eyewitnesses reported in the media about the attack in the Stockholm district of Hammarby Sjöstad that the perpetrators shot their victim in the head and chest from a distance of one and a half meters.
The 10.3 million Swedes have to read new such horror reports all the time. Young men from the gang milieu are almost always perpetrators and victims. Bullets hit bystanders again and again in shootings on the street. In 2019, doctor Karolin Hakim died in Malmö with her two-month-old baby in her arms when rival gangs shot at each other in broad daylight. The child survived unharmed. A police officer was also one of the victims, and several children were injured. Gang wars are almost always about conflicts in the drug trade, fought in districts with severe social and integration problems.
The fact that Sweden, of all places, with its friendly Bullerbü image is now at the top of the European statistics of deadly shootings, has given the country an ongoing political issue with profound effect. The Social Democrat Löfven resigns – ten months before the elections – in November and makes room at the top of the government for the previous Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson. The commentators agree on the most important reason: Löfven has not been able to contain the gang shootings in the past three years and thus shaken the people’s basic trust in the state.
