Hand Grenade Hurled Into Swedish School Amid Explosives 'Epidemic'

The explosive, thrown into a school in the town of Botkyrka outside of Stockholm, has been identified by the police as a live hand grenade. The grenade subsequently detonated, causing damage and creating a crater, the local news portal Stockholm Direkt reported.

"Two young men have thrown something that broke a window at a school building in Norsborg," the initial police report said about the incident that happened in Karsby School in Botkyrka south of Stockholm.

When the police later discovered the suspicious object inside the building, bomb technicians were summoned to the site confirmed that the object indeed was a hand grenade.

"Yes, the hand grenade landed in a concrete corridor of five-six meters. Walls and doors have suffered fragmentation damage and a crater was also left," school principal Jan Jönsson said.

However, the hand grenade didn't land on premises where classes are actually held, but in a nearby venue currently rented to a hip-hop studio. One of the rooms is rented by two brothers who have their roots in the local Botkyrka-based hip-hop group The Latin Kings.

However, the grenade attack wasn't necessarily aimed at either the school or the artists, the police said. One of the working theories is that the perpetrators simply wanted to test the efficacy of the grenade by throwing it into an empty room to see what happens next. However, the problem with this theory is that the perpetrators managed to break the security windows, which wasn't a necessary step.

The event was classified as infliction of damage dangerous to the public. No suspects have been apprehended so far.

In recent years, Sweden saw a spike in incidents involving hand grenades. The number of grenade-related attacks peaked in 2016 at 35, which is unparalleled compared with the rest of the EU. While "only" 21 grenades exploded in 2017, police commissioner Catharina Greiff of the National Operational Department (NOA) said that any grenade explosion was "completely unacceptable." So far, hand grenades, whose use has been solely attributed to criminal circles, have resulted in two deaths, one eight-year-old boy killed in Gothenburg in 2016 and a man in his 60s killed in Stockholm in January this year. Even police stations suffered grenade attacks.

The use of hand grenades among criminals has become a trend in Sweden, the police said. "This development isn't to be seen nowhere else in Europe," the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported.

"In all other comparable countries, both within and outside the EU, the use of illegal hand grenades in this way among criminals is highly unusual, except for countries in the state of war," a NOA report stressed defining Sweden as an outlier.

Catharina Greiff stressed, however, that the majority of illegal arms flooding Sweden, including hand grenades, can be traced to the Balkans and former Yugoslavia.

To counter the hand grenade epidemic, the Swedish authorities proposed a quadrupling of the minimum penalty for carrying a hand grenade. Another step involves a three-month "grenade amnesty" to be held between October 2018 and January 2019.

In the modern era, Sweden has held tree arms amnesties (in 1993, 2007 and 2013 respectively), which resulted in tens of thousands of firearms being collected.