Sweden’s national bomb squad has been called out to 30 blasts in the past two months and 100 so far this year, more than twice the number in the same period in 2018, as concern grows about rising levels of violence by criminal gangs.
Police arrested three people over the weekend following an explosion in an apartment block in the southern city of Malmö early on Friday that blew out the building’s main door, shattered windows and substantially damaged the entrance level.
The blast was the first of three in the space of 24 hours,
local media reported, with others destroying cars and damaging property in Växjö, 127 miles (204km) north-east of Malmö, and Landvetter outside Gothenburg on the country’s west coast.
“There are 10 million people in Sweden and I have not found the equivalent of this level of explosions in any industrialised country,” Ylva Ehrlin, an analyst with the bomb squad,
told the public broadcaster SVT.
The number of recent explosions was “unacceptably high” and “obviously undesirable”, she
told the news agency TT. “It’s very serious, a social problem. We not only must find the explosives and tools, but uncover the cause.”
Most of the blasts have occurred in big cities, authorities said. Almost a third have taken place in Malmö, scene of a string of increasingly violent gun and bomb attacks that rightwing politicians have linked to the large flows of immigrants who arrived in in
Sweden during the 2015 migration crisis.
Nineteen bombs have also exploded in the capital, Stockholm, so far this year, and another 13 in Gothenburg, compared with 39 nationwide in 2018. The squad have also defused 76 suspected bombs that were spotted before they could be detonated.
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