Police in Sweden are investigating after a pair of thugs opened fire on a McDonald’s restaurant with an AK-47 rifle. The shooting is one of two violent incidents at a McDonald’s outlet in the country in as many days.
The shooting was captured in video footage shared on social media on Thursday. In it, the masked passenger of a BMW loads an AK-47-style assault rifle. When told to “shoot,” by another occupant of the car, he fires more than a dozen rounds at the empty restaurant and nearby shopping center, before the driver speeds off into the night.
According to Swedish newspaper Expressen, police combed the scene – located in a northern Stockholm suburb – for shell casings on Thursday. They identified multiple bullet holes in the McDonald’s sign, and found several shells.
Hours earlier, police in the western Swedish city of Trollhattan had to deal with a separate gang incident at a fast-food eatery. Shortly after 2am on Wednesday, two groups of hoodlums trashed a late-opening McDonald’s, attacking each other, upending furniture, and damaging several cars parked outside. By the time the police arrived, the mob had dispersed.
Such incidents are fast becoming the norm in Sweden, a country that was once a byword for peace and stability. According to government statistics, deadly violence in the criminal underworld has increased more than threefold since 2012. Homicide in general has nearly doubled in that time, while assault, sexual violence, threats and harassment have also all increased since 2015.
Sweden has also become the bombing capital of Europe, with 257 bomb attacks reported in 2019, up 60 percent from the year before. Its rising right wing places the blame on the waves of immigrants welcomed into the country in the past decade – and, in certain cases, the data backs them up. Around 180,000 immigrants came to Sweden in 2017, and a crime review by newspaper Dagens Nyheter said that first- or second-generation immigrants were behind 90 percent of the country’s shootings.
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