Midday. The autumn sun raises the temperature above 25 degrees Celsius. There are tourists in flip-flops heading for the beach, and others in designer clothes heading towards Puerto Banús. Some prefer to sit and have a drink on a terrace. The relaxed scene last Friday in the Nueva Andalucía area of Marbella (Málaga province, population 159,000) is identical to that of the previous week. Except, of course, for two people who were captured on a security camera. On one side, Hamza Karimi, a 23-year-old Swedish rapper, is talking on the phone. On the other, a compatriot who, as seen in the video, calmly approaches him and shoots him several times before fleeing. The musician died in hospital. The assailant was arrested a few minutes later. Just another day on the Costa del Sol.
The victim was known to Swedish authorities because he was part of the Stockholm criminal gang ecosystem, according to police sources. The alleged hitman is from Gothenburg, although he had no criminal record or connection to drug trafficking clans. The motive for the assassination is currently unknown. After the attacker’s arrest — the weapon was found in his car — he refused to testify before being placed in pre-trial detention. The fact that both are Swedish is no coincidence. “And at this point, nothing surprises us,” says Marbella’s anti-drug prosecutor, Carlos Tejada Bañales. His feeling is the same as that of the police fighting organized crime on the Málaga coast, who are now accustomed to encountering Nordic gang members. In recent years, they have been involved in a dozen incidents involving bombings, shootings, and at least three deaths, in addition to around 100 arrests. The underlying theme is drug trafficking. And the bullets fly for a variety of reasons: stolen merchandise, non-payments, transaction errors, revenge, egos, or simply trying to muscle in on more business. “On top of that, they’ve lost any inhibition: they now kill in broad daylight, regardless of whether they’re seen,” warns Tejada Bañales.
The wave of violence that has swept Sweden since 2012 is behind the rise in crime in southern Spain. The echoes of clashes between gangs — such as Foxtrot, Rumba, Tadese, and Gualara — resonate thousands of miles away. Officers working in the field believe the situation will escalate. “It’s going to be a security issue on the Costa del Sol,” say Swedish police sources, who also believe that “it’s just a matter of time” before third parties unrelated to drug trafficking are injured or killed (something that, so far, has only happened once in recent years).
The ‘Swedish clan’
The infiltration of Nordic gangs on the Costa del Sol first came to light in the spring of 2018. On May 12, David Ávila, alias “Maradona,” was leaving his son’s communion in San Pedro Alcántara when a motorcyclist approached him, riddled him with bullets, and fled. It was the debut of the so-called “Swedish clan,” whose members murdered another person in Estepona that summer — both crimes were confessed to in court years later — and, in the fall, two bombs exploded in Benahavís, for which they were also convicted. The gang was led by Amir Mekky, who was 21 at the time. His brutality still resonates with the police officers who participated in the investigation that led to his arrest in Dubai in June 2020. The group also included his older brother, Fakry Mekky, and brothers Karim and Ahmed Abdul Karim, all of whom hold Swedish passports and are now no longer in Spain. “It was the first time we had seen those levels of violence. It left its mark on us,” says one of the officers who tracked them down. The situation — coupled with other homicides in the area over the space of just a few months — also prompted the creation in 2019 of a police group within the Spanish National Police Organized Crime Unit (Udyco) dedicated exclusively to the settling of scores between gangs. That same year, a man — also Swedish, like his killers — was shot dead after being tortured in a villa in the Puebla Tranquila residential area in Mijas.
Investigators are surprised by the youth, cold-bloodedness, and level of violence of the Scandinavian drug traffickers who have arrived more recently. “Whether they’re the leader of the organization, his lieutenants, or the enforcers. Many are in their twenties, or even minors who have turned the extraordinary into the ordinary,” says a police officer. Many of the gang leaders come to Marbella to conduct drug-related business or even to live, because they feel safer there. This isn’t always the case, however, as others arrive with the only mission of killing them.
Many of them grow up in disadvantaged neighborhoods in large cities, among gangs where violence is the only way up the social ladder. “But increasingly, the hitmen recruited today aren’t actually part of these gangs: they’re hired just for a hit, a kind of temporary job. It’s what the police call crime-to-order. And they compare it to models like Uber,” explains Manne Gerell, associate professor at the department of criminology at Malmö University, who points out that these young people increasingly come from families of foreign origin and are more diverse in their typology. Including, adds writer and communicator Diamant Salihu, “the traditional middle-class Swedish teenagers, blond and light-eyed.”
“In an increasingly international world, it seems logical that certain national or regional phenomena end up affecting not only neighboring countries, but also other European Union member states such as Spain,” emphasizes Erik Fågelsbo, Swedish prosecutor and Nordic representative at Eurojust, Europe’s agency for judicial cooperation. A good example is what happened in October 2021, when several young men — “unscrupulous and very violent,” according to police sources — from the Tadese gang attempted to kidnap a rival from the Goulara clan in Marbella. They assaulted him in the street but failed to get him into the van in which they intended to take him away. In response, the next day, they were shot outside a strip club in Fuengirola. The operation ended with the arrest of seven people. That year, together with the Civil Guard, another National Police operation served to strike a blow against Swedish drug trafficking with the arrest of 71 people on the Costa del Sol, including Chiab Lamouri — one of Sweden’s most dangerous criminals — and Lars Gunnar Broberg and Joakim Peter Broberg, respectively the now-deceased husband and stepson of the mayor of Marbella, Ángeles Muñoz. The prosecution is seeking 18 years in prison for Joakim Broberg.
Teenaged hitmen
Last year, the same pattern was repeated. In February, three Swedish nationals attempted to murder two fellow countrymen — they only managed to wound one — in Marbella. They were arrested in March, the same month in which a 17-year-old boy was also detained after arriving from Gothenburg with the sole purpose of killing a member of a motorcycle gang. It was the first time Spanish police had encountered a teenaged hitman. And the operation also served to dismantle an organization — a father, mother, and their 14-year-old son, all Swedish — based in Alicante and led by the teenager, who recruited young people to commit murders through channels such as Telegram and Signal. Tried in his home country, the adolescent was sentenced to two years in a juvenile detention center. “Minors are chosen because they are easy to influence and harder to track on encrypted applications,” explains Scandinavian journalist Joakim Palmqvist. This July, officers arrested another 16-year-old who had also traveled to the Costa del Sol to commit a murder, along with a 19-year-old accomplice. Both were Swedish, like the other four people arrested in the same operation, who allegedly provided the logistics and weapons. They were later released on bail.
The latest incident occurred on October 3, and was solved thanks to the intervention of the National Police’s citizen patrol unit, which quickly closed all highway exits and caught the killer near the Elviria residential area, east of Marbella. “They already have a lot of experience and they do their job well, like the other groups working in the area. Thanks to all this enormous work, we have so far managed to stem the tide of violence,” says another police specialist. “The situation here isn’t even remotely like what is being experienced in Sweden and neighboring countries,” other police sources add with satisfaction. They point out that the experience of teams such as the Special Response Group Against Organized Crime (GRECO) and the Udyco Costa del Sol units have served as a bulwark against organized crime. A barrier that, as Europol explains, has been reinforced this year by Project Grimm, an international operation seeking to increase police cooperation between countries. It includes police officers from Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, as well as Spain. Thanks to this, the situation has not yet gotten out of hand, they assure. No one is betting that it won’t do so in the future.
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