Abroad, Sweden | A wave of violence marks Sweden – the hunt for a notorious mastermind

Kurdish Rawa Majeed, 37 years old, has been a well-known figure in criminal circles in Sweden for years.

The family came as refugees from Iraq, and as a teenager Majid ran an ice cream stand in Uppsala with his mother.

Only 19 years old, he received his first sentence after being convicted of burglary and cigarette smuggling, but this was just the beginning of a long and violent criminal career.

Wholesale of drugs

Three years after the first sentence, a large quantity of cocaine coming from the Netherlands was found in Majed’s garage. This led to eight and a half years in prison.

– He was among a group of youngsters in Uppsala with whom this happened very early, as Tom Blacht, former Majid defender, points out.

-You can talk to some of them and help push in the right direction, but you can’t talk to others at all. He says he belongs to the latter group.

Shortly after Majed was released in the spring of 2015, he received a new sentence, this time for complicity in kidnapping and serious violence.

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He left Sweden

With one year left to serve, he was released on probation in February 2018. After a few months, he was allowed to leave Sweden because the correctional service deemed there was a threat to him.

Rawa Majid never returned to Sweden, and today he obtained Turkish citizenship by investing in the country.

Turkey has no extradition agreement with Sweden, and from there, according to Swedish police, he now leads an extensive criminal network.

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Long list

He is a father of three children and is internationally wanted for planning murder and serious drug crimes, but the list of crimes linked to them is much longer, according to Swedish prosecutors.

Parents of criminal rivals and former friends are murdered in their homes, and random people are murdered because they may have been mistaken for others.

Children barely older than Majid’s children are hired as killers, and other minors are killed to set an example.

Countless explosive devices have exploded at addresses linked to gang members, and cars and buildings are constantly being shot at, and sometimes also at young people in the open streets because they are wearing the “wrong” jacket.

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Encrypted messages

The Swedish police have no doubt about the central role played by Majid in the whole matter. After securing access to the encrypted messaging service Encrochat, they were able to follow how crimes were planned and carried out in real time.

It was also on Encrochat that the alias Foxkurdish first appeared, and the police quickly determined that this was Rawa Majid.

Messages revealed how he organized large-scale drug deals, and photos on social media showed piles of banknotes and expensive Rolex watches.

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From Umeå in the north to Helsingborg in the south, police were able to confiscate cocaine, amphetamine and cannabis bearing fox marks.

The gang members, including famous rap artists, wore rings bearing the symbols of a fox and diamonds to express their loyalty to Majed and his gang. It eventually became known as the Foxtrot Network.

Since then, many of them have been arrested and imprisoned, and the man nicknamed the Kurdish Fox is wanted by Interpol.

Internationally

According to the Swedish police, the Foxtrot network not only organizes drug trafficking into Sweden, but also supplies criminal networks in other countries.

According to police, Majid’s gang is also allied with several other criminal networks in Sweden, including Bronnätverket, Zeronätverket and Maynätverket in the Stockholm area.

The police now consider members of these gangs to be foot soldiers for the Kurdish fox.

guerrilla

Since last year, Majid’s gang has been waging a war with the so-called Dalennävterket in southern Stockholm, a criminal gang led, according to the police, by Mikael Tinzos, known as the Greek.

According to SVT, the two entered into a form of truce this summer, agreeing not to attack each other’s relatives.

The recent outbreak of violence in the Uppsala region is therefore more related to the split within the Foxtrot network, with former friends now turning on each other and on each other’s family members.