Peter Mangs, a Swedish gunman behind a string of shootings between 2003 and 2010 in Malmo, has claimed he once came close to shooting the footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic for parking illegally.
Mangs says that he saw the footballer’s red Ferrari on a pavement and became so angry at Ibrahimovic’s “typically Balkan behaviour” – a reference to the striker’s Bosnian heritage – that he returned home to get his gun.
“I thought there would be a proper hullabaloo in the media if the gent in question were to be shot,” Mangs has written in a new book about his life. However, when he returned to where Ibrahimovic’s car was parked, the footballer had left.
Mangs was arrested in November 2010 following a manhunt for a gunman police had linked to more than a dozen shootings in 2009-2010 in Sweden’s third-largest city, Malmo, where about 40% of the 300,000 residents are first- or second-generation immigrants. Police later said he was also involved in shootings before that period.
The victims were shot through windows of apartments, businesses, parked cars, or as they were walking along the street. A court convicted Mangs of 13 out of 20 charges he faced, including two counts of murder and four attempted murders, and ruled that he underwent a psychiatric evaluation.
Judges said there was compelling evidence to show that Mangs had shot and killed two people: 20-year-old Trez West Persson in 2009, while she sat in a car; and 66-year-old Iranian-born Kooros Effatian, in the victim’s home in 2003.
