Gävle shooting investigation expands to 28 attempted murders

Prosecutors have expanded the investigation into last year’s shooting in central Gävle to include 28 suspected attempted murders, after concluding that the bullets’ range put far more people at risk than the six who were physically injured.

Svenska Dagbladet reports that a 14-year-old boy is now suspected of 28 counts of attempted murder connected to the October 2025 shooting on Södra Kungsgatan, a street lined with shops and restaurants. Prosecutor Jenny Örn told P4 Gävleborg that additional people present at the scene have been granted victim status as investigators reassess who was within lethal range.

The legal consequences will be unusual. At 14, the suspect is below Sweden’s age of criminal responsibility and cannot be prosecuted in the normal way. In such cases, courts can instead hear a so-called evidentiary trial—bevistalan—where the question is not punishment but whether the suspect committed the acts. That can provide a formal finding for victims and for any later civil claims, but it does not produce a sentence.

The widening of the case also shows how gun violence investigations increasingly hinge on technical reconstruction rather than eyewitness accounts. A shift from six injured to 28 alleged attempted murders is not a change in what happened on the street; it is a change in how the state classifies risk after mapping trajectories, distances and lines of fire.

The case sits inside a broader pattern: minors used as direct perpetrators in serious violence, while older organisers and facilitators—drivers, weapons suppliers, those who plan and pay—are harder to tie to the trigger pull. When the suspected shooter is too young to prosecute, the pressure on investigators to build cases against adult accomplices rises sharply.

Svenska Dagbladet notes that a man in his mid-20s is suspected of aiding and abetting attempted murder, though it remains unclear whether evidence will be sufficient for indictment.

Twenty-eight names are now attached to a shooting that, at the time, sent six people to hospital.