It is the summer of 2024, and a 13-year-old boy has just been added to a private Signal group by a recruiter with a menacing username.
A message soon appears in the chat: “Are you ready to murder someone?”
Within hours, the chat is filled with new handles.
They offer the teenager mentorship.
The tone at times is reassuring, promising cash and a sense of belonging.
They tell him not to worry, that after he carries out the shooting, he will be sent to a special care facility for children and teenagers, where they will be able to get him out.
One user says, “Brother, before a job it’s normal to feel nervous, but after you fire the first shot you’ll see everything becomes easy.”
But the messages are also laced with threats.
The recruiter who had added him to the group warns the boy, “If you take the weapon and disappear, we will come and find you, brother.” He adds that he would only get paid “if you hit him – he has to die”.
He continues with an instruction: “Go behind him one or two metres and shoot him three or four times in the back.”
He then gives him practical advice on handling a weapon, including telling him “don’t play with the trigger”, and sends him instructional YouTube videos on how to load and shoot a pistol in a steady stream of messages.
Eventually, the original recruiter and the other users fall largely silent, and the exchanges largely narrow to just the boy and a user, whom police would later identify as a 25-year-old who was a key figure in a Stockholm-based gang.
“It’s hard now, but later you’ll be a king, brother,” he assured the boy just before the planned shooting.
“I will finish him,” came the reply.
Moments later, the boy sent panicked messages. The police or security guards were on the way, he wrote, as he begged for a taxi.
The boy had shot his target, but the man had survived.
Only 48 hours had passed between the boy being added to the Signal chat and the shooting.
Police arrested him shortly after, but due to his age, he was not convicted or sentenced.
He was placed in state care and remains under social services supervision.
When the recruitment process began remains unclear, but investigators believed it likely started when he responded to an ad – possibly a so-called murder contract – circulating on social media platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram, or on encrypted apps like Telegram, where children are now usually recruited.
In late 2024, Telegram shut down a channel called Samurai Barnen (Samurai Children), which had amassed about 11,000 members, after Swedish police notified the platform.
Screenshots later published by local media outlets from the channel show how the “murder contracts” appeared.
Murder:
Malmo urgent: 800k-1m ($85,000-107,000)
Gothenburg urgent: 300-400k ($32,000-43,000)
Stockholm urgent: 500k ($53,000)
Denmark: 1 million ($107,000)
Throw a grenade:
Malmo: 30-50k ($3,100-5-300k)
The attacks are often framed as “challenges” or “missions”, which the police say is a “gamification technique” to make the posts more engaging and less intimidating for children.
The timeframe from a child’s initial contact with a recruiter to carrying out a violent act can range from a matter of days to a month, Salman Khan, a project manager of an exit programme for children in gangs at Fryshuset, Sweden’s largest youth organisation, told Al Jazeera.
“Ten years ago, recruiters would have to go to a place where kids are physically, but now social media is the way,” said Khan, who works with a programme called 180 Degrees, which connects children who have been involved in crime with positive adult role models who can help them leave that world behind.
Khan describes the recruitment process as a form of grooming where boys, and to a lesser extent girls, as young as 12, who he says don’t necessarily know the difference between “play” and the “real life” consequences of carrying out a violent act, are lured into a criminal underworld.
In his conversations with children in SiS facilities, Khan has observed how the role many aspire to in gangs has been inverted in recent years.
“It has become a status thing to be the one to throw a grenade or to shoot someone rather than be a gang leader. Ten years ago, everyone wanted to be Tony Montana [the fictional crime boss in the film Scarface],” he explained.
The shift reflects how social media and the glamourisation of violence in popular culture have made instant notoriety more desirable than lasting authority, Khan added.
Carrying out an attack can give the child a sense of validation in the gang and access to fast money that can get them the “clothes, chains, phones, cars and luxury life” they see on social media and in television series.
He used the example of the popular Netflix series Snabba Cash (Fast Cash), which portrays Sweden’s criminal underworld as a spectacle of guns, money and fast cars and features teenage characters who act as runners for gangs.
