When the blast ran through the Stockholm suburb of Hässelby Villastad on a weekday night last week, I was sitting in my living room about to send a text.

The front windows rattled so hard I thought they might shatter and I broke off typing mid-word.

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I’m no expert on how bombs sound but we already have had two bomb attacks in this part of the city this year, so the odds were that this was number three.

The first bombing, in January, blew a football-sized hole in an apartment block near where I often cycle. Four arrests were made following the attack, local media reported at the time.

The second, in March, knocked a whole row of wooden terraced houses off their foundations behind my son’s secondary school. Six people were detained in the wake of that attack.

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What started as internal conflict between rival drug gangs has spun into a spiral of revenge attacks as gang members — often frustrated in their attempts to kill each other — have begun bombing the homes of each other’s families.

These family members — parents, siblings, cousins — live all over Stockholm and across Sweden’s central southeast region, giving the attacks a seemingly random feel.

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The upswell of violence has been so intense, widespread and chaotically executed — inexperienced teenage boys are often recruited to carry out the attacks — that there is a growing sense here that no one is safe from it.

So far this year there have been 134 bomb attacks in Sweden, up from 90 in all of 2022. At the same time, the number of shootings remains very high compared with other European states: 289 so far this year and 391 in 2022, in a country of 10 million people.

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On Thursday evening, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson made a rare “speech to the nation” that was broadcast live on national television, seemingly with the aim of demonstrating that he is on the case.

He sought to outline how his government plans to get to grips with the violence through increased police resources, longer sentences for convicted criminals, and new surveillance powers. He has even raised the idea of calling in the army after 11 gang-related deaths in September alone.

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“Sweden has never seen anything like this,” he said. “No other country in Europe is seeing anything like this.”

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Alongside his far-right backers the Sweden Democrats, Kristersson has sought to link rising violent crime to high levels of immigration and what he called poorly managed integration.

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The government has yet to bring to justice Sweden’s most high-profile gang leader, Rawa Majid, who continues to operate with seeming impunity from Turkey, where he was recently granted citizenship.

A clash between Majid and a former ally called Ismail Abdo is believed to be behind much of the recent violence in Stockholm.

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