There have been "explosions" in Oslo tonight. I guess not known why yet but I observe there have also been increasing numbers of explosions, mostly related to organised crime and gangs in the Netherlands, which unlike Sweden's issues with the same, seem to have flown under the radar internationally
A similar trend is reported in Italy. Is violent crime becoming more violent and international? Is "someone" (a state actor perhaps?) flooding the black market with weapons?
Overall violent crime has been falling for decades pretty much everywhere in Europe so it's interesting to see these trends
This is the kind of thing the old twitter was very good at. You could make some observations, ask generally if they were correct and before long a statistician and a criminologist appeared to answer your question. Closely followed by an expert in geopolitics with Europol following behind..
If you were really lucky they'd end up publishing a paper on the phenomenon. So, are the stories about gangs, violent crime and explosions in Europe just a coincidence in my feed? Or is something really going on? There's no question that the Netherlands underworld has turned very nasty.for instance.
Hybrid warfare
@Ruth_Mottram I think you could be spot on:
If a state actor wants to destabilize democratic countries, supply of weapons and explosives to criminal communities would, I believe, be efficient.
Hybrid warfare
@Chris yes indeed, especially if it was easy to drive further wedges by say targetting criminal gangs with a certain specific characteristic such as ethnicity?
Hybrid warfare
@Ruth_Mottram
The grenade in the picture doesn't look like anything Russia uses in Ukraine, as defined by the "Basic Identification of Ammunition in Ukraine" guide, version 8.0.
There is a German and a Swedish grenade in that guide that are sort of similar, (DM61 & Shgr 2000) but grenades are really quite basic weapons so there are loads of makers and designs. In another guide I found Chinese and Iranian grenades that also looked sort of similar.
@Chris
