Teen accused of hiring hitmen revealed as Swede living in Sydney’s west (2025)

A Swedish teenager accused of recruiting hitmen for the violent gang murders which are terrorising Scandinavia was posting selfies dripping in designer goods while living with family in Sydney.

The 15-year-old boy, who cannot be named because of his age, was arrested on Wednesday morning by the Australian Federal Police.

They had been asked to arrest the teenager after Danish NSK police found evidence he had been recruiting hitmen to carry out murders in Denmark.

In one case, NSK and AFP allege, the boy offered a hitman 200,000 Swedish Kronor ($48,000) and a gun to carry out a murder.

The boy had been living on a quiet street in Sydney’s suburban west, the Herald can reveal, with extended family at the time.

Photographs posted to social media show the boy trying to cultivate a gangster image – wearing designer clothes including Louis Vuitton and gold jewellery – while walking the streets at night with his fists clenched, or putting up the finger toward the camera.

Months before he arrived in Australia, in mid-last year, the boy posed in front of an Audi sports car and threw gang signs.

The boy’s extended family in Sydney are pro-social members of the community.

The teen’s family sent him to Australia to escape the orbit of gangs that use lethal violence to control the drug trade, which flows through the strategic and massive ports in Nordic countries.

Instead, the boy is now bail refused charged with using telecommunications services to orchestrate murder. There were no confirmed deaths as a result of his actions, police say.

Police do not expect to extradite him to Denmark, instead, he will be prosecuted in Australia’s children’s courts.

Sweden is battling a wave of gang violence, the European Parliament announced in February, often with teenagers recruited by the underworld to vandalise, bomb and even murder rivals.

“In January 2025 alone, there were approximately 30 gang-related explosions reported in the country, often in residential areas and mostly concentrated in the capital Stockholm,” a parliamentary briefing reads.

Often, the gangs recruit children because it’s difficult to secure convictions on very young offenders, and even when it happens, the penalties are far lower.

The most powerful force in Sweden’s underworld, The Kurdish Fox, and his Foxtrot Network use encrypted devices and intermediaries to recruit children for many of their murders.

The Fox, real name Rawa Majid, was sanctioned by the US last month over his links to Iran and accusations he was carrying out attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets on behalf of Tehran.

Last week, Foxtrot’s “violence co-ordinator” was charged with orchestrating a 15-year-old boy to murder another boy, the same age, by shooting him in the head at a sushi restaurant in Stockholm in 2023.

The murdered boy had, himself, been a gang member who had shot at a home linked to the Foxtrot network.

In 2023-24, more than 100 murder cases had suspects under the age of 15, according to the country’s prosecutors, and gun-related homicides are triple other nations in Europe.

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