Sweden is bordering on “civil war” as the country has become gripped by migrant violence, according to a leading expert.

Göran Adamson, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Uppsala University, told Express.co.uk that his country was becoming a “capital of violence” – partly due to a wave of suspected criminals moving there.

According to official figures from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå), the number of fatalities a year per million from gun violence is more than double the European average.

In 2017, there were 281 shootings in Sweden and by 2022 that number had grown to 391, 62 of which were fatal. According to the Office for National Statistics, in the UK there were 28 people killed by shooting in the year ending March 2022.

That means the Swedish rate of death by shooting was more than twice that of the UK, despite Sweden having a population less than a sixth the size. Most startlingly, in 2022 the gun murder rate in Stockholm was around 30 times that of London, despite having a population of less than a million.

Speaking to Express.co.uk from Berlin, Mr Adamson said that the main pockets of the violence in the Swedish capital aren’t found in the centre of the city, but in residential neighbourhoods.

“It’s terrifying. You can barely believe it,” he said. “That has mainly to do with the suburbs of Stockholm because some of these suburbs are extremely violent and so forth. So things are getting worse.”

A research paper he published in 2020 shows a link between the sharp uptick in crime and the marked increase in immigration into the country.

He found that in 2017, 58 percent of those “suspected of crime on reasonable grounds” had migrated to Sweden. However for murder, attempted murder and manslaughter the figures swelled to 73 percent. The corresponding data for robbery was 70 percent.