Swedish rapper Einar, 19, was shot and killed in Stockholm, Swedish media reported Friday.
“It is a young life that has been lost, and I understand that he meant a lot to many young people. It’s tragic that another life has been lost,” Prime Minister Stefan Lofven told Swedish news agency TT.
While the motive of the shooting remains unclear, the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reported that Einar had recently received multiple threats.
Swedish public broadcaster SVT said the rapper’s shooting was gang-related.
In recent years, Sweden has seen a rise in shootings, gang-related violence and organized crime.
The 19-year-old rapper was shot multiple times late Thursday outside an apartment building in a residential area.
The shooting took place shortly before 11 p.m. local time (2100 UTC) in Hammarby Sjostad in the south of Stockholm, the newspaper Expressen, the broadcaster SVT and several other Swedish media reported, citing police officials.
Emergency responders administered first aid before he died at the scene, police said.
“We are actively working to figure why it happened and who can be behind it,” Stockholm police spokeswoman Towe Hagg told the AFP news agency.
Police are reportedly on the hunt for at least two suspects over the shooting.
Police have not yet issued an official confirmation of the victim’s identity, as per usual practice. But all major Swedish media outlets identified him as Einar, whose full name is Nils Kurt Erik Einar Gronberg.
Last year, Einar was kidnapped and beaten up by rival rappers with ties to a Stockholm crime gang.
A Swedish court in July sentenced another award-winning rapper, Yasin, to 10 months in jail for conspiring to kidnap Einar.
Yasin was detained as part of a broader criminal network case, in which 27 people were convicted of crimes including murder and robbery.
At the time, SVT reported that the leader of the criminal network had orchestrated the kidnapping plot, and Yasin was the bait.
Einar, who won several music awards, including Swedish Grammys, had made songs that referenced crime, drugs and weapons.
As a young teenager, Einar started posting his music on social media. He had his breakthrough in 2019, when he released the song “Katten i trakten” (The cat in the area), which topped the Swedish singles chart.