Gunnar Appelgren is a criminal inspector, with long experience of working with organized crime in Södertälje.

He summarizes it as a large number of "red conflicts", ie deadly conflicts, with motivated perpetrators who have access to weapons.

It is not clear what type of explosives have been used in the recent blasts, but in at least one of the attacks, a hand grenade is believed to have been used.

"Want to mark with violence"

Appelgren bluntly states that you "use what you have access to".

- If you look at the damage recently, it seems that bangers and hand grenades have been caught.

- These are bursts of frustration, I call this, that you want to send a signal or mark.

You can't get hold of people, so you blast at stairwells to mark the person who lives in the house, or you blast at a restaurant.

It may be that you know that the person in question is staying abroad but still want to target the person with violence.

At the same time, he says that it can also be about "extortion blasts", which according to him consists of showing a person in debt that you know where they live and that things could get worse in the future.

Much of the research that has been done shows that shootings and bombings come as a surprise.

Criminologist Manne Gerell, working at Malmö University, tells the news agency TT that the grenades almost exclusively come from the Balkans and that they are easy to handle.

Reduced number - but Sweden stands out

Contrary to what one might think, the number of cases of public destruction, i.e. detonations, has decreased somewhat in recent years (see fact box).

Even so, the number of explosions is still high.

Last year, 90 explosions were carried out, of which 31 were in the Stockholm police region and 35 in the South, where the number was the highest.

- Sweden was among the absolute worst affected by explosions and gun violence in Europe even before 2022. Now it is much worse than it has ever been, says Manne Gerell to TT.

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Hear Police Commissioner Gunnar Appelgren, an expert on gang crime, about explosions: The purpose, what type of bombs are used and who gets hit.

Photo: SVT