The brother-in-law told the Swedish public broadcaster SVT that the man had been cycling through an underpass in Stockholm suburb Skärholmen when a group of young men began to shout at him. When he turned back — presumably to tell them off — he was shot in the face, with his young son then having to ring the police and get help.   “It’s incomprehensible. It’s hard to take in,” the brother-in-law said. “We know what happened but I don’t think we’ve really absorbed it properly yet.”  

He stressed that his brother-in-law had never to his knowledge had anything to do with criminal groups, and was, he believed, “completely innocent”.

“The only thing he lived for was his son, and as I said they were on their way to the swimming pool and instead of it being a pleasant experience his son witnessed him being shot in the face.”  

Sweden’s prime minister, called the murder “absolutely horrific”, in a written comment passed to the TT newswire.  

“My thoughts are with the victim, the little guy and their relatives.” 

Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats, said that the killing showed it was long overdue for Sweden to “declare outright war” on criminal gangs. 

“It is not good enough to just belch out platitudes, it’s time for Sweden to declare full-scale war against every single individual in these criminal gangs,” he wrote. 

The opposition Social Democrats called for the government to work together with the opposition parties to bring in additional measures to combat gang shootings.  

“This is a brutal reminder that we will not end this with the measures that have been taken so far,” Ardalan Shekarabi, the party’s justice spokesperson told TT. “I think it is very important that we think in new ways and work together. We will not just solve gang crime through simply proposing new laws.” 

The killing was the latest in a series of shootings to take place in Skärholmen over the past month, with a man in his 20s shot dead on March 1st and a man in his mid-20s injured on March 13th.

As the victim did not have a criminal record, police are reportedly treating the shooting as a case of mistaken identity.