One of the most depressing features of social media is the near unavoidability of snuff films. I love Twitter but it’s never nice to be confronted with footage of Ukrainian and Russian lads being torn to pieces, or people being burnt alive on the New York Subway.

One piece of footage that passed across my Twitter timeline before Christmas showed the point of view of a man chasing another man through a car park and cold-bloodedly shooting him. As his victim lay on the ground, begging for mercy, the shooter calmly approached and shot him to death. 

The footage purported to come from Sweden and to show the murder of 23-year-old Ninos Moses Khouri, better known as the rapper Gaboro.

Gaboro, born in Sweden with Syriac heritage, had been an up and coming rapper whose songs had been attracting millions of views and streams on YouTube and Spotify. His murder, it appears, was the result of his gang ties. He had been in a restaurant the year before when his friend had been murdered. According to Expressen, he had been named by a rival gang on a list of “whores” who would be “exterminated”.

Rap and gang crime are intimately linked in the UK. Rappers who have been murdered include GB from the Moscow17 collective and Perm from the group CT. In Sweden, though, rappers have been dying at such a rate that it has to be the most dangerous profession in the country.

Last year, the rapper C.Gambino won a Grammi Award in the Hip-Hop of the Year category — a prestigious honour at Sweden’s oldest music awards ceremony. Weeks later, he was shot to death in a car park in what police suspect was a gang hit. In 2023, a teenage rapper named Adouli was gunned down at a sports pitch while children were training. In 2019, the rapper Rozh was murdered while walking his dog (tragically, his brother had been murdered the year before).

The most sensational murder, though, claimed the life of the chart-topping 19-year-old rapper Einár in 2021. Einár was unusual in the Swedish rap scene, as a white kid who was the son of an actress. Rather than being born into gang life, he appeared to have adopted it — and his baby-faced appearance made the macho posturing look downright absurd. 

Still, Einár was extremely successful — the most played Swedish artist on Spotify in 2019. “Welcome to Sweden,” he rapped in a track that bore that title, “Stockholm city. Everyone can take lives, man, it’s best you’re careful.” (One can only imagine quite how comical this would have sounded decades before.)

If I was a Swedish rapper, I would be doing all I could to separate myself from gang activity

The success made him a target. He was kidnapped in 2020, with two of his fellow rappers, Yasin and Haval, being convicted for participating in the crime. Jewellery was swiped and embarrassing photos were taken and then leaked online. Einar was defiant and even seems to have taunted his captives when Haval’s brother was killed. Soon, in October 2021, he was himself shot to death outside his home.

Curiously, at the time of his death, Einar had been with a member of the infamous “Death Patrol” gang. Rumours held that this man, Mehdi “Dumle” Sachit, had betrayed Einar. He denied this, when interviewed by journalists, and gave a nonchalantly chilling comment on Sweden’s gang wars. 

“Let people shoot each other,” he said, “Don’t disturb them”: 

It is not a “Kalle” or a “Fredrik” who dies. These are people who themselves created problems and who made a mess. Let’s eat each other, until we run out.

Sachit was himself murdered in 2022. 

If I was a Swedish rapper, I would be doing all I could to separate myself from gang activity, not least because the killing of famous entertainers appears to be providing bigger bragging rights for criminals. Still, rap has provided a window into the pointless horrors of Sweden’s gang wars, where bullets and grenades fly over drug money and childish resentment. 

Since opening its doors to mass non-EU immigration, Sweden has gone from being one of the safest countries in the world to the European capital of gun crime. Turkish, Kurdish and Somali gangsters direct crime both nationally and internationally. (Rawa “the Kurdish Fox” Majid ran his gang “Foxtrot” from Turkey for years, with the Turkish government defying extradition requests.)

Such is the brutality of Sweden’s gangs that children are being recruited as contract killers — the logic being that kids receive shorter sentences. Swedish prosecutors claim that in the first 7 months of 2024, 93 kids aged 14 or younger were suspected of murder, attempted murder or aiding and abetting murder. Naturally, this means kids end up being murdered as well.

The Swedish government was in denial for years. Paulina Neuding, a Swedish journalist, wrote:

When stories started appearing about gang-rule and attacks on people going into immigrant neighborhoods, sometimes referred to as “no-go zones,” a government agency started a PR campaign to rename them “go-go zones.”

As Neuding observed, it was relatively easy for elites to be in denial because crime mostly affected poor immigrant neighbourhoods. It is harder to sustain the facade of optimism when award-winning musicians are being riddled with bullets, even if their lyrics glorified the sort of violence to which they would fall victim. It is difficult to blame such rappers fully when demand remains so high. The life of a gangster can sound glamorous — but the death never is.