A SWEDISH mafia boss accused of supplying the weapons used by teenage hitmen has been arrested after years of living a quiet life on the Costa Blanca.
Officers detained him last Thursday, July 9, at his home in Orihuela, an inland town in the Vega Baja district of Costa Blanca South popular with British and Scandinavian expats.
Swedish prosecutors accuse him of arms trafficking tied to organised crime in Sweden, and Spanish police describe him as the alleged supplier of the ammunition and weapons used in gang attacks there.
Those attacks include shootings and bombings ordered as part of gang score-settling, a hallmark of Sweden’s escalating gang conflict.
Police say the networks he is linked to recruit hitmen through social media, often teenagers, and pay them in cryptocurrency specifically because it is harder for investigators to trace.
Officers searched his home after the arrest and seized several electronic devices, which investigators hope will provide evidence of further offences.
He has appeared before the court in Orihuela and is due before the Audiencia Nacional, Spain’s central criminal court, which will handle his extradition to Sweden.
The arrest comes as part of a wider crackdown on Swedish mafia figures operating on the Costa Blanca, which has produced at least three other confirmed Swedish organised-crime arrests so far in 2026.
They include a raid on the so-called Dalen network in Alicante on January 22 and a 25-year-old detained in Malaga on June 16 over a haul of around 100 grenades smuggled in from the Balkans.
Spanish and Swedish police have worked together on cases like these since at least 2018, according to Swedish police’s own account, illustrating how entrenched Swedish gangs have become on Spain’s Mediterranean coastline, directing violence in the home country from a safe distance.
Spain has seen a number of teen hitmen foiled in recent years.
Police in Malaga have confirmed that Swedish bosses are turning to teenagers too young to even drive as ‘disposable contract killers’, paying them as little as €4,000 or €5,000 a job.
In one case last summer, a Swedish teenager was arrested on an e-scooter at midnight, minutes from carrying out a hit. He had flown in from Gothenburg just 48 hours earlier with an adult accomplice.
In another case, a 17-year-old was arrested last year for allegedly gunning down a Dutch national in Fuengirola on December 7, 2024 – Spain’s first confirmed case of a minor carrying out a contract killing.
One recruitment network was also run from the Costa Blanca, where a Swedish family used Telegram to groom children as young as 13 and 14, with their own 15-year-old son helping radicalise other teenagers.
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