Zürcher Nachrichten - Hitwomen: how teen girls are being used in Sweden crime wars

"I had a case involving a 15-year-old girl recruited to shoot someone in the head," Stockholm prosecutor Ida Arnell told AFP.

"She was able to choose the type of mission she wanted, in other words, to aim at the guy's door or his head. She chose the head."

She was arrested with a 17-year-old male accomplice, who pulled the trigger, leaving the victim clinging to life after being shot in the neck, stomach and legs.

Arnell said an increasing number of girls are offering their services to mobsters, including as hitwomen, on encrypted messaging sites.

Girls "have to show that they are even more determined and tougher (than boys) to get the job," the prosecutor added.

Some 280 girls aged between 15 and 17 were charged with murder, manslaughter or other violent crimes last year -- though it is unclear how many were linked to organised crime.

The statistic is far from a blip, say experts, with the role of girls and young women in the violent organised crime networks that are plaguing the Scandinavian nation slipping under the radar for years,

They say this blind spot has benefitted the crime networks and put young women at extreme risk.

- Kids under 15 hired to kill -

Shootings and bombings are a near-daily occurrence with organised crime often recruiting teenagers under 15 -- the age of criminal responsibility -- to do their dirty work on encrypted apps.

"In general the young kids are thirsty for blood on these chats," regardless of their gender, Arnell said.

Sweden was once known for low crime, but the gangs -- who emerged over the last 15 years -- have changed all that with drug and arms trafficking, welfare fraud and human trafficking, the authorities say.

The government now calls them a "systemic threat" to the country.

They are even reported to have infiltrated Sweden's welfare sector, local politics, legal and education systems as well as juvenile detention care.

Police say the leaders of the loose networks increasingly orchestrate operations from abroad, relying on intermediaries to carry out their vendetta.

Hits, shootings, beatings and bombings are often contracted out and put up for grabs on encrypted sites.

"Girls are often identified as victims... but their participation in criminal circles is much more widespread than what we have long assumed," Sweden's Justice Minister Gunnar Strommer said in April, admitting a lack of research into the problem.

"Preconceived notions about the role of women and girls in crime present the risk that they are seen neither as criminals nor as people in need of help," he added.

- Girls 'deeply vulnerable' -

"We have very little data and studies on the role of women" in organised crime, Swedish police told AFP.

Sweden's National Council for Crime Prevention is currently conducting an in-depth study on the nature of crimes committed by girls and women, as well as the violence to which they are subjected. Its conclusions are due in October.

Girls "can play a driving role and facilitate criminal activities, and at the same time be victims themselves and deeply vulnerable," said the KSAN umbrella organisation of groups dealing with drug and alcohol abuse among women in a report published in March.

"A large majority of them have a drug addiction problem and have some kind of untreated trauma," said Maria Ljuslin, co-author of the report.

Two-thirds of girls who have committed drug-related crimes have also been subjected to sexual violence, the report added.

- 'People trusted me' -

Natalie Klockars was born to a drug addict mother and a father who went to prison when she was a child.

She was 19 when she started dealing drugs, initially to finance her own cannabis addiction.

"After a month I had more than 300 clients. A few months later I had 900 and after that I stopped counting," the now-28-year-old told AFP in a park in central Stockholm.

"A lot of them were surprised that I was a woman."

"People trusted me... Nobody suspected me."

She grew her business quietly over four years, recruiting girls and building up a monied clientele her rivals could only dream of.

But with easy money came violence.

At 23 and pregnant with her first child, Natalie refused to pick up three kilos of drugs from her supplier, having been tipped off that she was going to be robbed.

Young men showed up at her door and took her to a nearby forest, still in her pyjamas.

There she saw her best friend on his knees, a pistol at his temple.

"Will he die or will I have a miscarriage because of this stress," she said she asked herself.

Her friend's life was spared.

"I knew this was not the life I wanted to give my daughter," she said.

The day her daughter was born she left the criminal world behind.

O.Hofer--NZN