It is just after nightfall in Bislett, a quiet student neighborhood in central Oslo, when two children armed with hand grenades step off a bus and approach their target.
As undergraduates pile out of bars and stumble to their dorms, the 13-year-old boys arrive at a nail salon and hurl the grenades at the shop front.
The blast shatters windows, riddles brick walls with shrapnel, and triggers a bomb alert on Oslo’s emergency text message system. The boys vanish into the night.
They have just completed their first major operation for Foxtrot, a crime syndicate that originated in Sweden but is now expanding across the border into Norway.
Foxtrot is one of Europe’s most ruthless criminal networks linked to dozens, if not hundreds, of bomb attacks and attempted contract killings as its foot soldiers vie for control of the Scandinavian drug trade.
Teen given double death sentence in Iran for role in anti-regime street protests
Grenade attacks and shootings are thought to be an effort to scare off their new competition for organized crime in passive Norway, investigators told The Telegraph.
Since it was founded in Stockholm around 2010, the syndicate has proved virtually impossible to dismantle. Rawa “Kurdish Fox” Majid, the syndicate’s leader, issues his orders from Iran – where he lives under the protection of the Ayatollah’s regime.
A legal loophole in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden means that children under the age of 15 cannot be prosecuted for even the most serious offenses, such as murder – making them ideal recruits.
The boys who carried out the attack on the nail salon are understood to have been approached on social media by a middleman, or “handler” for the Foxtrot gang, which was looking for under-15s to bomb the salon.
After agreeing to throw the grenades at the salon, they had an in-person meeting with a man in his 30s at a car park near a hiking trail outside of Oslo.
Here, The Telegraph understands, they were given a pair of Bosnian army-issue hand grenades, which had been smuggled into Norway.
Some time after they were arrested, one child was placed in juvenile care and the other was released.
Norwegian privacy laws mean that neither child can be named publicly.
Iran arrests woman who stripped in protest at ‘abusive’ dress code policing
However, Norwegian MPs and investigators say the vast majority of such children come from a migrant background; many feel poorly integrated into Norwegian society, which makes them easy for Foxtrot to manipulate.
At the scene of the nail salon attack, it is clear how lucky the residents of Bislett are not to be injured or killed.
The blast from the first grenade sent debris and shrapnel across a radius of perhaps 20 yards, leaving broken windows and street lights in its wake.
After a few minutes, a well-dressed, older Norwegian woman, who identifies herself as the owner of the building that houses the salon, arrives and lets herself in.
Elisabeth Rye, 79, is happy to speak about the attack, but maintains she has no idea why it was carried out.
Her Vietnamese tenant, who ran the salon, had been ill and had not been seen for several months.
“The police know who did this, but they let them go because they were so young, that’s why they [Foxtrot] hired them,” Ms. Rye says.
“Crime is taking off in all areas here now,” she adds, before phoning her insurers about the shattered windows in the salon.
The Bislett grenade attack was alarming enough, but it was just the first of three Foxtrot-linked acts of violence committed by children in late September and early October.
It was followed by a similar grenade attack on a sushi restaurant in Strømmen, a suburb 12 miles east of Oslo.
A 15-year-old linked to the Foxtrot network was suspected of hurling a grenade at the restaurant on the night of Oct 7.
Read more similar news:
Comments:
comments powered by Disqus
