How Sweden Became a Transnational Crime Hub

The murder of two British businessmen turns a once-quiet seaside port into a symbol of unbridled gangland criminality

I didn’t quite understand what the fuss was about as I sat in a cafe in the heart of Malmo, a city at the southern tip of Sweden, savoring some Syrian sweets and getting up to speed on press coverage of the city. I was in town to investigate the brutal murders of two British businessmen, Farooq Abdulrazak and Juan Cifuentes. To read the press reports, this city was little short of a war zone: the hand grenade capital of the world, where assassins would kill you for $5,000. Life here was meant to be cheap. If the media coverage was right, I was supposed to be running to my car, dodging bullets. Instead, I found it to be safe and, with a vibrant cafe culture, disarmingly charming. Home to 179 nationalities, it was a microcosm of the world.

On July 14, 2024, Abdulrazak and Cifuentes were found shot and left in a rental car in Fosie, a suburb of Malmo known for its dilapidated warehouses, drugs and prostitutes. The circumstances of their deaths were reminiscent of gangland killings. The presence of a third passenger in their rental car complicated the story. The man vanished after they crossed the Oresund Bridge into Malmo from Copenhagen. The murders didn’t feel like an unfortunate incident involving two unsuspecting businessmen, and Swedish police launched a manhunt for the third individual, further intensifying suspicions surrounding the case. It was hard not to suspect a gangland connection.

However, according to the British press, their families maintain that the victims had no connections to crime. They were childhood friends from north London, both family men and well-regarded in the community. Their trip to Malmo, where they met a tragic fate, was for a travel business they operated together. Their families say that the media’s insinuations of criminality stem from racism. If the two had been white, such conclusions wouldn’t have been reached.

News outlets seized on the story, casting it as part of a broader narrative of transnational crime, with Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo at its center. Malmo was the entrepot for an international crime network of people, drugs and weapons. It was a symbol of social decay and a multicultural nightmare brought about by uncontrolled immigration. The violent deaths of Abdulrazak and Cifuentes were an expression of unbridled gangland criminality that threatened everyone. How had this once-quiet seaside port become an international crime hub?

The media interest was easy to understand; the killings in Malmo popped holes in Sweden’s near-mythic position in the global imagination. A land of progressive politics, robust social welfare, gender equality and liberal tolerance — a country that appeared impervious to the problems that plagued other nations. To the outside world, these murders exposed fissures in that utopian image, turning the international spotlight on Sweden’s struggle with organized crime and gang violence, issues that had already been alarming the Swedish public for a decade.

Malmo was no longer the Sweden of tech and eco cities, nor the multicultural utopia advertised on its tourist brochures. Rather, it was the grim poster child for everything Sweden’s critics said was unraveling. The far right claimed mass migration was the cause. Malmo epitomized what Sweden’s Scandinavian neighbors, and more specifically their politicians, described as the “Swedish condition” — a euphemism for the country’s unchecked immigration and rise in gang violence. But the reality, as I found out, was far more intricate. After the killings, I returned to Sweden to see what had gone wrong with the country of my birth and to cast a critical eye on a place for which I had immense affection.

On a personal level, too, these killings disturbed me. I just couldn’t believe that Sweden had become so violent. It messed with the nostalgic picture I had of the country. I was raised in Rinkeby, a suburb of Stockholm, during the 1980s. At the time, the suburb wasn’t known as a crime hub, just a place where all the foreigners lived, a strange place where few Swedes ventured, giving it an edgy feel that the Swedish press picked up on. But otherwise, Rinkeby was the place where my friends and I played Dungeons and Dragons, rode on our BMX bikes and rummaged through dustbins in search of aluminum cans to trade in for spare coins to buy sweets. Our parents were hardworking immigrants and scolded us for mimicking the local alcoholics, but those bins called us, and we raided them anyway.

In recent years, though, terrorism, an increase in crime, drugs, shootings and antisocial behavior tainted Rinkeby’s reputation. It became known for terrorists like Rakhmat Akilov, an Uzbek asylum-seeker who lived in Rinkeby and went on to ram a truck into the heart of the capital’s commercial district in 2016. In 2017, following riots in Rinkeby, then-President Donald Trump cited the riots as an example of a crime dystopia created by mass immigration and marauding gangs. Despite its issues and bad publicity, I found out, Rinkeby was not the place where Sweden’s organized crime found a host. It was Malmo, and the reasons were complicated.

To truly understand Malmo’s ascendancy, I had to examine its relationship to Stockholm and the country’s second-largest city, Gothenburg. The latter was Sweden’s second-most important city and a significant criminal hub due to its strategic location. The cities were wedded to each other, yet none could achieve the same level of infamy as Malmo. What was Malmo’s criminal secret?

Even before the deaths of Abdulrazak and Cifuentes, I knew something was different in Stockholm. Attitudes had shifted among some of my friends. Whenever I returned to Stockholm, I always sought out one particular childhood friend, a security guard who had his finger on the pulse. Both of us grew up in Rinkeby, and he was a foreign-born Swede like me — my partner in crime. We were just two brown kids riding around on our bikes, up to no good. Though Sweden does not record ethnicity in its population statistics, it does record where one’s parents are born. If at least one parent is born in Sweden, one is considered “indigenous.” If both are born outside of Sweden, one is considered a “foreign-born” Swede. For example, Sweden’s most famous soccer player, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, is a “native” Swede but not an indigenous Swede, since his parents were born outside the country. And so he is still, despite representing his country on many occasions, considered a “foreign-born” Swede. Whether it was that classification, specifically, or the fact that people don’t believe you when you say you are Swedish, due to the absence of blond hair and blue eyes, all of us have felt the “undercover racism,” as Ibrahimovic puts it, when your surname isn’t “Anderson or Svenson.”

Nevertheless, homecomings to Rinkeby always involved the same ritual for me and my friend. We’d do a tour of the area as we made our way to Rinkeby Torg — an open square that was the heart of the neighborhood — and grab some delicious kebabs and reminisce about the days when our world was small. In the early 1990s, my family moved to London, and I returned every few years or so. Later, my friend married a Swedish woman, had children and built a steady life. In the summers, he took his family to “landet” (“the countryside”), as so many Swedes do. We would always laugh about it and rib him; perhaps, by virtue of marriage, he had finally become “Svensk-Svensk” — an “indigenous” Swede.

But this time round, in late 2022, something was different. The kebabs didn’t taste as good, probably because my friend had lost his joie de vivre. As we sat in the square, I realized my friend had changed. It was as though I was having kebabs with Suella Braverman, the firebrand former British Home Secretary known for her hardline stance on immigration. “Things have changed here, man,” he said, leaning in, waving his hand in frustration. “These fucking invandrare (immigrants), they’ve ruined this place.”

I was taken aback. It was strange to hear him talk like that, given that we were children of immigrants. And it wasn’t as though Rinkeby had suddenly become more diverse — this suburb had always been an immigrant enclave. It was built in the 1970s, as part of Sweden’s social housing experiment. Back then, as now, spotting a blond and blue-eyed Swede in Rinkeby was something of a rarity. To me, at least, little had changed except for some apartment blocks being demolished, with similar, uninspiring ones built in their place. And rats: We didn’t have any back then; now they hopped around the green spaces like they owned the place. But my friend wasn’t angry about the presence of immigrants — he was angry about what Rinkeby had become two decades on from our childhood: a den of crime, violence, fear and rats, the last representing the loss of civic pride. He might have moved out and lived in a nicer neighborhood, but he loved the place. “My mum used to make us pick up the litter even if it wasn’t ours!” he growled.

He was right. Rinkeby had changed. When we were kids, Rinkeby was never a hotbed of gang violence like the Swedish media are reporting now. The press said that kids — aged 13 to 14 — were working as assassins, knowing that murder would land them a paltry four years in prison. This was unheard-of when we were growing up. Shootings are so common now that they are described by Klara Hradilova Selin, a researcher from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, as a “social contagion.” These shootings and gang rivalries were fuelled by weapons and drugs sourced from Malmo. All roads lead to the seaport.

In Rinkeby, rival gangs, called the Shottaz and Dodspatrullen, mostly made up of Somali-Swedes and inspired by London’s drill music scene, were not only causing havoc locally, but their reach crossed over to Copenhagen. In 2020, their gang rivalry resulted in double murders in Denmark. One of the leaders of the Shottaz, Yasin Abdullahi, an award-winning rapper, had become both a symbol of the problem and a source of local pride. He had been involved in the killing of Sweden’s leading rap star, Einar, in 2021. It made international headlines again. “Sweden was never like this,” my friend said at the mention of the Shottaz. His voice was nostalgic and embarrassed. “This is a place of opportunity, man. Our parents fled wars for a chance here, and now these fuckers are making excuses, poisoning it for everyone.” He concluded by repeating the mantra of racists everywhere: “Send them back.”

Although my friend grew up in Rinkeby, which was akin to a foreign enclave, Sweden in the 1980s was prosperous and ethnically homogeneous, with little crime to speak of. The country was sheltered compared to others in Europe. When Sweden joined the EU in 1995, my friend came to London as a foreign exchange student. I still remember the shock on his face when we attended a party and saw a student casually rolling a spliff. He spent the night tut-tutting, killing the mood of the party. Apart from alcohol, he had never come across the drug scene that was part and parcel of London nightlife. I can only imagine his reaction when the construction of the Oresund Bridge at the turn of the millennium was completed. It physically connected Sweden to Denmark and the rest of the continent, making it easier for substances like cannabis to come in from Amsterdam.

Such access was likely heightened by the internet revolution, which was later turbocharged by social media. The rest of the world, though not unfamiliar to Swedes, arrived much faster. Maybe, like my friend, Sweden was unprepared for the consequences. Things may have worsened with the global economic downturn, putting a strain on the welfare state, which was further burdened by a mass influx of Syrian refugees in 2015.

Sweden’s woes touched London too and illustrated how connected Sweden had become. In February 2022, Anis Hemissi was jailed for killing Flamur Beqiri, a Swedish-Albanian drug dealer, in broad daylight in Battersea, London. Swedish police said that Beqiri had been part of an international drug ring that moved cannabis worth over $2 million into Scandinavia. The deaths of Abdulrazak and Cifuentes two years later seemed like a continuation of this trend. I was puzzled as to why these transnational crimes had suddenly migrated south. To me, it was akin to organized crime syndicates leaving London and heading to sleepy seaside northern towns like Blackpool or Scarborough. I had to solve that puzzle and head to Malmo, though not before stopping off at Gothenburg to meet an old contact there and learn about the city’s criminal links to Malmo.

I arrived in Gothenburg on an unusually hot summer day, just a few days after the burials of Abdulrazak and Cifuentes. Gothenburg is a three-hour drive north of Malmo. It was once a prosperous, outward-facing city involved in privateering and maritime trade. It even managed to produce its own Swedish East India Company, which reached as far as Bengal and Japan. Today, however, the city is often in the news for being part of Sweden’s transnational crime nexus, a recruitment ground for jihadists and far-right groups.

I had come to meet Niklas (not his real name), whose past had been a life of criminal entanglements. He was tall and weathered and met me outside the hotel. We jumped in his battered transit van and drove to Slottsskogen, a picturesque park 10 minutes away. Over a coffee, we sat on a park bench watching Swedes strolling, savoring the last days of summer, while Niklas took me into his gritty past. He told me how his prison experiences had not reformed him but provided him with new opportunities. An Albanian Swede had introduced him to gunrunners in Malmo. “For about 2,500 kronor [$240] I got several weapons,” he said. I discovered that a few phone calls could still get you relics from the Bosnian civil war — Serbian gangs could sell you automatic machine guns with a few hand grenades thrown in as a bonus.

Crime provided more opportunities for Niklas as Sweden’s ties grew with Europe. After the completion of the Oresund Bridge, Sweden caught the eye of international drug cartels based in Amsterdam and other port cities. Sweden was an untapped market. It was part of the 29 European countries that belonged to the border-free Schengen Area that allows one to flit through countries with no border checks or passport control. It was a smuggler’s dream. The only problem was, who could supply the cartel’s products inside the country? Swedish criminals based mostly in Malmo stepped in to act as its agents, and transnational crime in Sweden was born. According to Niklas, this relationship was sped up by the advent of the darknet, which slashed waiting times for drug deliveries as the relationship between Swedish gangs and international cartels solidified.

Niklas’ story was the story of Sweden’s evolving crime scene. It went from the indigenous biker gangs of the 1980s to the Yugoslav-Serbian gangs of the ‘90s to this hybrid transnational crime network that was very “inclusive.” Swedes fell in love with cocaine. Traces of it have even been found in the Swedish parliament. Cocaine coursed through Stockholm’s veins, or rather its sewage system, as researchers discovered. During just one week in October 2019, Stockholmers smoked nearly 1.8 million doses of cannabis, snorted 33,670 lines of cocaine and took over 451,000 doses of amphetamine. That was $3 million spent on drugs, much of it passing through Malmo.

Firearms, too, mirrored the tastes of the new criminals raised on the digital battlegrounds of Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto and other online shoot-’em-ups. The new generations were more gun-literate and were no longer content with AK-47s and Makarovs, but wanted Glocks, Smith & Wessons and Berettas. And though the Balkans is still the main supplier of weapons, this is already changing as arms from Ukraine trickle into the Balkans. This is what blowback looks like in practice.

Even though Niklas was “foreign-born,” he couldn’t get away from the idea that transnational crime was a byproduct of mass immigration. Like my childhood friend, he echoed the sentiments of the Swedish far right and Danish officials. Sweden, once insular and homogeneous, had officially embraced multiculturalism in 1975. While certainly bolstering Sweden’s labor force, this also changed Sweden’s cultural and social tapestry, perhaps a bit too fast. Lawen Redar, a Swedish lawmaker of Kurdish Iraqi descent, said that Sweden went from being “the world’s most homogeneous country to one of the most diverse countries in the world.”

This brought about its own set of challenges, from “white flight” to the emergent suburban ethnic enclaves, like Rinkeby, where I grew up. As Sweden strove to be a humanitarian superpower coming to the aid of those fleeing war and famine, it invited wave after wave of refugees. But as Kajsa Norman, author of “Sweden’s Dark Soul: The Unravelling of a Utopia,” points out, the country did not explore what the consequences of that could be for Swedish society, for fear that it would be politically incorrect to do so. This helped fuel the far right, which was already riding on a populist wave in Europe.

The issue was greatly exacerbated in 2015, when Sweden welcomed Syrian refugees. It was the biggest movement of people since World War II and tethered Sweden more closely to the fate of the Middle East. While the intention was no doubt to help Syrians, it also mitigated Sweden’s labor shortages and counterbalanced an aging demographic. Inadvertently, it also plugged Sweden further into the intricate tapestry of criminal networks. A study for the European Parliament in 2012 had already warned of how criminal networks and terror groups were becoming increasingly blurred and benefited from their connections to transit countries like Turkey. This allowed criminals and terrorists to export narcotics and weapons into Europe.

Rawa Majid, the son of Kurdish Iranian refugees, perfectly epitomized the interplay between migration, transnational crime and terrorism. He was a Swedish tabloid’s dream. Dubbed the “Kurdish Fox,” he trafficked vast quantities of narcotics into Sweden while seemingly remaining untouchable in Istanbul, Turkey. His gang orchestrated chilling acts of violence, using children as young as 13. He even dabbled in a bit of terrorism: Swedish and Israeli authorities claim that his gang planted grenades at the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm on behalf of Iran. What outraged the Swedish public even more was that Ankara would not extradite him to Sweden because Majid had bought himself citizenship by investing his ill-gotten gains in Turkey. More recently, Majid’s gang was purportedly involved in a hand grenade attack at the Israeli Embassy in Copenhagen.

The connection between transnational crime and mass migration was quite easy to make, especially in times when Sweden’s economy looked increasingly frayed. Recent research, though, has shown how criminal activity transcends ethnicity. There are many countries with relatively homogeneous populations and immensely high crime rates; equally, there are many countries with diverse and multiethnic populations and low crime rates. Mass migration alone does not adequately explain the rise of transnational crime in Sweden. Perhaps there were other issues that explained Sweden’s woes.

Maybe Sweden, having had a relatively small colonial footprint in history, was not accustomed to outsiders, unlike Britain or the United States. So when it did embrace the world, it was ill-prepared. While it expected immigrants to integrate into Swedish society, providing free Swedish lessons and so on, it did not prepare the indigenous population for the new arrivals, who had their own mores and customs. So both “foreign-born” Swedes, as they became known, and indigenous Swedes felt alienated by each other. It was like a mixed-race couple that hadn’t explained to their extended family what such a union would mean for all sides, in terms of culture and customs. Niklas, for instance, found the arrival of Iraqi refugees difficult to deal with. “They are clannish,” he said, adding without any irony, “they don’t follow the rules.”

In her book, “Sweden’s Dark Soul,” Norman shows how dominant the Swedish state has been in the lives of Swedes. Swedes trust that their government will look after them from the cradle to the grave. As such, there was a time when the state could dictate even the most mundane activities at home. This is very alien to many new immigrants. “Many immigrant parents know,” said Niklas, “that their kids can tell the government that they hit them. So parents don’t control them out of fear that their kids will be taken away.” Niklas believes that fear of government intervention has eroded parental authority, sometimes to the detriment of youth discipline.

According to Niklas, who grew up in foster care, the change from living with foster carers, where you got personal attention, to a more institutional approach in homes for juvenile offenders has unwittingly facilitated a breeding ground for criminal indoctrination. Some of these institutions, as the authorities have discovered, have fallen prey to criminal networks looking to groom the next generation of gang operatives.

As the afternoon waned and our meeting ended, I decided to walk back to the hotel. As I made my way, I saw white Swedes sitting at bar tables on the city’s pedestrianized streets. There were few “foreign-born” Swedes sitting with them. As I walked toward Nordstan mall, I found the “foreign-born” ones hanging out among themselves, and I felt at ease. This was the first time I felt how stark the divide between these two worlds was, and I was thankful that I lived in London, which had its race issues for sure, yet all ethnicities and backgrounds mingled with each other.

The next day, I caught a train to Malmo — the city where organized crime supposedly originated — to experience firsthand what this transnational crime hub was like. A quick glance at the comments on Flashback, a Swedish internet forum that prides itself on free speech and resembles a more mainstream version of 4chan, reveals a thread titled “Malmo – This Damned Nest.” The discussion, which spans 12 pages, is largely focused on how immigration has supposedly ruined the city.

The three-hour journey to the city was picturesque, most of it flanked by the sea. It reminded me of my childhood, of visiting the Liseberg amusement park and my mother taking advantage of a government scheme and sending me to a farm, where I spent my summers fishing and jumping into haystacks. Gothenburg and Malmo had very few immigrants then, and I was probably one of the very few brown kids there. How things had changed. As I neared the city, I overheard blond and blue-eyed Swedes, from small-town Sweden, casually peppering their speech with Arabic expressions like “wallah” (“I swear”). I noticed how the Swedish spoken by foreign-born Swedes in Malmo sounded different. I wondered whether it sounded strange and foreign to older Swedes and if it was the reason some considered the city a foreign country.

I arrived just as the news broke that the police had arrested a man linked to the murder of Abdulrazak and Cifuentes. The third man had been caught. The news of the arrest didn’t register with the people I spoke to. Some didn’t even know that two British men had been killed and confused it with a young Somali-Swede’s murder the previous week. It seemed like such violent incidents had woven themselves into the fabric of daily life in Malmo. People had become numb to the killings and so the news went unnoticed.

Despite its negative reputation, Malmo seemed quite safe. The world seemed to gather in the city’s famous square, Mollevangen, with its diverse range of cuisines, peoples and cultural events. While this diversity offers an incredible experience, it also has repercussions. Malmo hosts the largest Jewish population in Sweden, many of whom found refuge in the city while fleeing Hitler. The city also has a significant Palestinian population that fled Israeli persecution. Understandably, tensions in Gaza often pit these two communities against one another.

When the Eurovision Song Contest was held in Malmo this year, featuring an Israeli singer, the city witnessed mass demonstrations, drawing notable figures like Greta Thunberg to the streets. Whenever global events unfold, Malmo often reflects them — whether through Palestinian flags draped from balconies or the presence of Syrian refugees like Shadi Farah, a journalist who lives and works there.

Farah arrived in 2014 and held an immensely positive view of Swedes in general and Malmo in particular. As a refugee, he experienced unprecedented kindness from native Swedes, even in the smallest towns. He dismissed those with racist attitudes as “Vikings” from a bygone era. Despite the negative reputation of Malmo suburbs like Rosengard, known for incidents of gang violence, Farah still described Rosengard as a “desirable place” to live. He explained that the suburb was “full of life” and that any crime that occurred was largely related to gang violence, which rarely affected the general population. But Farah’s opinion was skewed: He had left a country that had been riven by civil war, barrel bombs, militias and dictatorship. As he told me, he had trekked across Europe to find sanctuary in Malmo and had flourished there.

Despite Farah’s optimistic portrayal of Rosengard, when I visited the suburb, it appeared neglected and desolate — far from desirable. It was actually worse than Rinkeby, which I had visited a few years earlier. Even Zlatan Court, the celebrated astroturf soccer pitch that bears the footprints of Sweden’s most recognizable soccer star, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, looked worn out. This local landmark, which draws numerous tourists eager to see where Zlatan began his journey, often leaves them disappointed. Nike, the company that sponsored the soccer pitch, doesn’t seem interested enough to refurbish the chipped “Swoosh” logo or renovate the pitch. Perhaps that was the real issue: Neither the company nor the local government seemed to care about what happened to Zlatan Court and the housing estates that surrounded this iconic place.

A plaque at the pitch features Zlatan’s words: “Here is my heart, here is my history, here is my game, take it further.” Yet, it struck me that, unless you are Zlatan, you are a forgotten individual. And I could see that those left forgotten, without guidance, appreciation or support, would not take things further — they would create problems instead.

Those forgotten individuals did indeed create problems that very night. The police sent a text alert to residents of the Ramlavagen area of Rosengard, warning them to stay indoors as they worked to defuse two suspected hand grenades. Videos of the explosions circulated on TikTok, with locals laughing at the deadly spectacle as if it were just fireworks — as if explosions and shootings were everyday events. The next morning, I visited the site, located in the midst of another graying housing estate. To my surprise, residents were casually kicking around the exact spot where the explosions had occurred. They seemed indifferent to the event, treating it as if it were routine, a daily occurrence. One man shrugged his shoulders and speculated that the grenades might have been linked to the killing of a Somali-Swedish youth the previous week. The grenades may have been intended for a gang member, but they put hundreds of families at risk. One family sat listlessly on the balcony picnicking, watching the proceedings. I got the feeling they had seen or heard many such goings-on in Rosengard.

Having covered terrorism and bombings across Europe for over a decade, I had never seen a crime scene treated like this — even if no grenades were found. In the United Kingdom, the site would be cordoned off, with forensic experts meticulously combing every inch for clues. Here, however, residents sat drinking sodas, casually contaminating the crime scene. A policewoman stood idly by her car, seemingly unconcerned, while three of her colleagues loitered near a doorway, seeking shelter from the light rain. When I spoke to the local officer, she seemed unfazed by the risk of contamination. This provincial response suggested that incidents like this were so routine that they no longer warranted proper attention, but it also suggested that the police lacked the resources and training to handle such events appropriately. Was this a clue as to why Malmo had become known as the grenade capital of Europe? The police just didn’t approach the problem seriously.

A 2020 study by Rutgers University, conducted on behalf of the Swedish police, seemed to support this assessment. The study concluded that Swedish crime-fighting efforts were uncoordinated and sporadic, recommending that the police adopt better practices to manage international crime. “Too few officers,” said Amir Rostami, a professor of criminology at the University of Gavle, “were dispatched to the scene of a shooting incident to adequately follow up on investigative leads. … Similarly, for bomb response, the reaction lacked critical coordination and, as a result, prevented a comprehensive and expert-driven investigative strategy.”

When I asked the locals who might be behind such crimes, they said they did not know. However, the local imam, Salahuddin Barakat of Islamakademien, had a different perspective. The next day, he stood on the pulpit for his Friday sermon and reprimanded the attendees about the two explosions and the killing of the young Somali-Swede. “We have everything,” he said, “a roof, food — what exactly are you killing for? Remember, those who are silent about this are complicit.” He seemed to imply that a form of omerta existed within the community, and it was the duty of residents to break the silence and speak out against the perpetrators. They were meant to help the government solve the problem, not keep quiet about it. They had to take responsibility for these brazen crimes occurring in their neighborhoods. Barakat reminded me of a nagging parent who had made many such sermons in the past, and I got the feeling that he will continue to do so in the future, for the audience seemed immovable.

While I was in Malmo, I received a call from my childhood friend. “I thought you might like to hear this,” he said, before telling me how one of his friend’s sons had been sentenced to 16 years for murder. He was baffled. “They are Swedish-Swedish,” he said — a middle-class family with parents deeply involved in every aspect of his life. What sort of malaise was this?

On my last day in Malmo, I met Bruno Soderberg, 17, an indigenous Swede, for a massive plate of shawarma. I shared my childhood friend’s story, and Bruno explained, “It’s because we have everything; our parents give us whatever we want. But we don’t know what to do with it.” Perhaps some Swedes, whether indigenous or not, have come to crave what gang life offers: excitement, purpose, belonging and perhaps even meaning.

But maybe it wasn’t just social neglect, the omerta of local communities or a lack of meaning. The realization came to me while I watched how Farah interacted with the shop owner. It took me back to my days in Damascus, and I understood why I loved Malmo so much: It reminded me of Syria and the Middle East, not of Sweden. Malmo was a foreign country in many ways, and I understood why it appeared so distinct from the rest of the country.

It struck me that when migrants came to Malmo, they naturally bonded for safety and security. Many of them had come from societies where governments were rapacious and extractive — not to be trusted. For them, security was not found in the government but in family and friends. The government was viewed as an enemy, and survival meant taking what you could by any means. This put them on a collision course with the Swedish state, which, as Norman points out in “Sweden’s Dark Soul,” expects all Swedish citizens to offer their loyalty and trust, as they historically have done.

Gabriel Sjoblom-Fodor, a research fellow at the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, explains, “The feeling of rootlessness, coupled with the sense that you are not made to feel at home unless you make serious compromises to your identity and beliefs, leads some people to seek belonging among peers in similar situations. They identify themselves with their neighborhoods, bonding over shared socioeconomic conditions. Many originate from countries where the state is either failed or tyrannical and cannot be trusted, and where family, relations, and community (or sometimes clans) serve as their safety net, within more social and diverse cultures. The combination of ghettoization, rootlessness, and the high barriers to fully integrating into society has driven some to look for their identity needs elsewhere — whether in extremist ideologies, countercultures, or even crime.”

Many of these cultural norms clashed with Swedish culture, which is highly atomized and ultraliberal. The Swedish proverb, “To be alone is to be strong,” contrasts starkly with an Arabic expression: “The family is not an important thing, it is everything.” There are also countless sayings from Muslim tradition which emphasize the importance of loyalty to family and community. Perhaps it was this inherent tension that contributed to the rise in transnational crime, whereby kinship ties and networks were preferred over loyalty to the state.

Those contrasting values subtly manifest themselves in daily life in Malmo. For example, Malmo has pedestrianized many of its main thoroughfares during the short summer months so that bars, cafes and pubs can set out tables for customers to enjoy their coffee or drink in the fading sun. What becomes immediately noticeable is that, unlike in London, the foreign-born Swedes do not mix easily with the indigenous Swedes. Much like in Gothenburg, in the squares of Malmo, these groups remain largely separate.

Sirajudin, a Swedish student I met of Palestinian and Moldovan heritage, explained that these differences are rooted in cultural values — his heritage places strong emphasis on family and tradition, which contrasts with the more liberal Swedish ethos. “That’s why,” he said, “you can’t get close to them.”

As I left Malmo, crossing the Oresund Bridge into Copenhagen, I was still uncertain about the fate of Abdulrazak and Cifuentes. Niklas and others I spoke to in the underworld suspected that some kind of debt was involved; after all, businessmen, they said, don’t just get shot by accident. These suspicions seemed validated as Swedish police began a manhunt for a 25-year-old gangster.

I also felt that their deaths had unfairly marked Malmo as a failed city, overshadowing both its struggles and its strengths. In my view, Malmo had been unjustly stigmatized and remained a vibrant, safe place. Malmo is Sweden, but also the part of Sweden trying to embrace policies that are not fully thought through. Malmo is the Sweden whose goodness and self-image have been challenged. In many ways, it has become a hub of transnational crime because it lies at a global crossroad where key issues of our age — criminal networks, human trafficking, terrorism, migration and political ideas of nationhood and family — meet and are blurred. That, then, was its criminal secret. All of these elements converged in Malmo, and that was why organized crime had moved south.

The city is like the kebab-pizza that has become a staple of both Malmo and Copenhagen. It symbolizes a blend of traditions and modern challenges. It is delicious, yet it has its health implications. Malmo’s story is not only about crime or immigration; it is about adaptation, resilience and the ongoing quest to define community in a rapidly changing world.

For those reading this as a forward, my name is Tam Hussein an award winning investigative journalist with a particular focus on conflict. The Blood Rep is my newsletter that covers security, jihadism, militancy and criminal networks. Do read my latest book The Darkness Inside.

-Tam Hussein