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Sweden in Focus
How involved are Sweden's biker gangs in violent organised crime?
Ep. 181
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Host Paul O'Mahony is joined this week by The Local's Becky Waterton and Richard Orange.
This week we talk about Nordic biker gangs and their ties to organised crime, a topic that rose to the top of the news agenda in Sweden after it was revealed that a Swedish leader of the Comanches biker gang was a guest at the wedding of the Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Åkesson.
As Jonathan Leman from the anti-racism foundation Expo reminded us in a recent episode, this was far from the first time that the far-right party had been linked to biker gangs. An investigation by the research group Acta Publica in 2022 showed, Leman said, that "connections to motorcycle gangs were found in many parties, but they were exceptionally over-represented in the Sweden Democrats."
He also noted that in neighbouring Denmark the Comanches "are regarded as a hybrid between a classical motorcycle gang and an immigrant gang. They even have their own rappers and everything."
So how damaging were the wedding party revelations for the Sweden Democrats? And what does the current generation of biker gangs in Sweden really look like?
Make sure too to read Richard's article shining a light on Nordic biker gangs:
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