The Cheapest Part of the Contract

A Wednesday Evening in Marbella

The news reached me the way most news reaches a cave in rural Spain these days… a newsletter, opened over coffee, the signal behaving itself for once. A surgeon had been shot dead in his own clinic on the Costa del Sol. By the following afternoon, police had arrested someone on suspicion of his murder. An eighteen-year-old. A Swede. I read that line twice, and then I put the phone down and went outside for a bit, because some details need fresh air before you can think about them properly.

Here is what is actually known, and it isn’t much. A little before six on the evening of Wednesday 7 October, a man dressed in black, hooded and helmeted, reportedly arrived at the Cirumed Clinic on the eastern edge of Marbella by motorbike, walked inside and shot Dr Alexander Aslani several times in the head. Dr Aslani was 57, a German national, a father of two, and had been practising on the Costa del Sol for the best part of twenty years. Paramedics could not save him. On Thursday afternoon, the Policía Nacional arrested an 18-year-old Swedish national in connection with the killing. The case has since been placed under judicial secrecy, which in Spain means the official tap is now turned off, probably for some time.

That is the whole of the solid ground, and I want to be honest about how narrow it is. Nobody has been charged. No motive has been made public. Spanish reporting suggests early lines of inquiry have ruled out any link between the doctor and organised crime, and the Málaga College of Physicians has condemned the killing in the strongest terms. A young man is in custody and is, as every one of us would wish to be in his position, presumed innocent. So this is not a piece about who killed Alexander Aslani, or why. I don’t know, and neither does anyone writing about it this weekend, however confidently they type. This is a piece about the shape of that arrest… because whatever this particular case turns out to be, the outline of it is one that European police forces have been staring at, with growing alarm, for several years now.

A Business Model, Not a Crime Wave

Europol, which is not prone to poetry, has given the thing a name that sounds like a software subscription: violence as a service. The idea is brutally simple. The people who want someone hurt or dead no longer do it themselves, and increasingly they don’t even hire a seasoned professional. They outsource the act to teenagers, recruited online, who carry the risk while the organisers stay comfortably out of reach. The model was refined in Sweden, where gang violence has been treated as a national emergency for years now. In 2023 alone, Swedish police recorded 363 shootings and 53 deaths in a country of barely ten and a half million people.

In June 2025, Europol spelt out what the market looks like. Children as young as 13 were being offered up to €20,000 for shootings, bombings and arson, recruited through Snapchat, Telegram and WhatsApp, and handed their jobs as “missions” in coded language and emojis, like a particularly grim mobile game. The agency said minors were now involved in more than 70 per cent of the criminal markets it monitors. Denmark alone had logged at least 25 violent incidents linked to Swedish networks in the space of a couple of months. The head of Europol’s organised crime centre, Andy Kraag, summed it up in a line that should have made front pages across the continent: “Teenagers being paid to pull the trigger.” Then he added, in effect, that this is simply what organised crime looks like now.

Spain is not a bystander in any of this. In May 2024, police in Benalmádena, a short drive up the coast from Marbella, arrested a Swedish minor who had travelled to Spain to kill a member of a rival biker gang. That arrest unravelled a network run from Alicante by a Swedish couple and their 15-year-old son, who recruited other children from Sweden and Denmark over Telegram, posting what Europol described as adverts for contract killings aimed at youngsters of 13 and 14. Denmark, by then fed up with Swedish teenagers crossing the bridge with guns, publicly called on Stockholm to stop exporting its “child soldiers”. By December 2025, a Europol task force called GRIMM, set up that April and later joined by Spain and the UK, had made 193 arrests in six months… including six people, one of them a minor, arrested in Spain that July on suspicion of planning a murder.

None of this is secret. It’s been reported, briefed, published and filed. It just never seems to arrive in the British or expat consciousness as one connected story. It arrives as a series of unconnected local tragedies, each one a few paragraphs long, each one quickly replaced by the next.

Murder, Delivered

I spent a career in RAF Police and then years in senior security management, and if there’s one habit that never leaves you, it’s looking past the person who did the thing to the person who benefited from it. Every investigation I was ever near followed a chain. Who gave the instruction, who passed it on, who paid, who drove, who kept watch. The whole art was in following that chain upwards, link by link, until you reached someone who had something to lose. Violence as a service is, at heart, a very clever piece of chain design. It is built so that the chain stops dead at the cheapest link.

Think about how it actually works, according to Europol’s own breakdown of the roles. Somebody wants a problem solved. A broker posts the job in an encrypted group. Spotters, drivers and people to stash a weapon are picked up the same way, often for a single task, and many of them never meet each other, let alone the person at the top. The shooter is recruited with the language of an advert… money, status, a sense of belonging to something, wrapped in the slick visual vocabulary of designer clothes and fast cars. The job comes with a location, a photograph and a fee, and then the kid is on his own. If it goes wrong, he’s the one in the cell. If he talks, he can’t say much, because he doesn’t know much. It’s the gig economy with the courier carrying the gun instead of your takeaway, and with exactly the same relationship between the app and the person on the scooter: you’re on your own, mate, and you were always replaceable.

The really cold part is the arithmetic behind the age. The gangs didn’t stumble onto teenagers by accident. They chose them because the law treated them more gently, because a 15-year-old faced youth care where an adult faced decades inside, and because a young person with no criminal record moves around without attracting a second glance. In plain business terms, the youth justice system became a cost advantage. Swedish ministers have said as much out loud, describing children being brutally exploited by networks that know exactly how lenient the system will be. When I read that, I didn’t think of gangsters. I thought of every procurement meeting I ever sat through where somebody had found a cheaper supplier, and nobody wanted to ask why it was cheaper.

And I keep coming back to the eighteen in that Marbella headline. Eighteen is old enough to vote, old enough to be tried as an adult, old enough to know better, as my father’s generation would have said. It’s also, in this economy, someone who has very probably been a commodity for a while already. I’m not saying that is what happened here. I am saying that the system I’ve just described would look at a boy of eighteen and see nothing unusual at all.

Why the Costa

From where I sit, in a cave near Orce with a flock of opinionated chickens and a water supply that comes and goes as it pleases, the Costa del Sol can feel like another country. It’s a world of gated urbanisations, private clinics, marinas and villas with names instead of numbers, and it has always had a dual personality. British readers of a certain age will remember the “Costa del Crime” headlines of the 1980s, when a gap in extradition arrangements turned the coast into a sunny retirement village for armed robbers. The cast has changed since then, but the stage hasn’t. Money, anonymity, an international airport, a port and a large transient population make it a very convenient place for people who would rather not be found.

Scandinavian networks have been part of that cast for years. In 2018, Spanish and Swedish police arrested nine people from Sweden, three of them in Málaga, over two killings in Marbella and Estepona. In 2024, a wanted Swedish gangster sparked a car chase through central Marbella that left five police officers injured. That same year came the boy in Benalmádena, sent to kill a stranger. None of these stories stayed in the news for long. Each was filed under the comforting heading most expats use for this sort of thing… It’s gangs settling scores with gangs, nothing to do with us.

That comfort is the bit I want to poke at. What happened on Wednesday doesn’t fit it. A doctor, in his own surgery, at teatime, with his partner reportedly in the same office. Spanish reports say the early indications don’t link him to organised crime at all, while German press, quoting the investigation, say detectives were examining whether it may have been a commissioned killing. Those two things can both be true, and if they are, it’s the most unsettling possibility of all: that the machinery built for gang wars is available to anyone with a grievance, a phone and the right contact. A service, after all, doesn’t much care who the customer is.

I’ll say it plainly, because it matters: we don’t yet know whether that’s what this was. It may turn out to be something else entirely, something personal, something nobody has guessed. But if your instinct on reading the headline was “well, that’s a gangland thing”, I’d gently suggest that instinct is now about five years out of date.

The Answer Is Always Younger

So what has officialdom done about it? The headline Swedish response has been to argue about how young a child has to be before you can put them in prison. In September 2025, the government announced it would lower the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 13 for the most serious crimes, pointing out that suspected offences involving under-15s had doubled in a decade and that the suspects in fatal shootings kept getting younger. The plan included special youth prison units for children who, a year or two earlier, would have been doing their maths homework.

The people who would actually have to make it work were not impressed. The Swedish police warned that lowering the age risked pulling even younger children into the networks. The prison service and prosecutors raised their own objections, the Council on Legislation criticised the bill for its thin evidence, and the children’s charity Bris pointed out that there’s no research showing such measures reduce crime. In June this year, the government quietly withdrew the 13 plan for lack of parliamentary support and promised a revised bill setting the age at 14 instead, which it expected to get through over the summer. The justice minister noted that more than 50 children under 15 had faced court the previous year on suspicion of murder or attempted murder. Bris’s response was that nothing suggested 14 would turn things around either. For context, Spain already sits at 14.

I understand the impulse. I spent enough years around discipline to know the appeal of a firm line. But follow the logic as a business owner would, and it falls apart. If the selling point of a teenage shooter is that he faces less punishment, then raising his punishment simply moves the recruiters down the age range, which is precisely what the police warned would happen. You haven’t touched the demand. You haven’t touched the broker. You haven’t touched the person who decided a human being should stop breathing and was willing to pay a stranger’s child to arrange it. You’ve just repriced the cheapest part of the contract.

To be fair to Europol, the more interesting work is happening elsewhere, in the dull, unglamorous business of cross-border intelligence, platform cooperation and, more recently, going after the people at the upper levels who order and finance the attacks from other countries. That’s the right direction, because it’s the only one that follows the chain. It’s also the one that never makes the front page, because “International task force continues methodical investigation” isn’t a headline anyone shares. A frightened politician promising to lock up thirteen-year-olds, on the other hand, writes itself.

The Man in the Surgery and the Boy in the Cell

By the time this goes out, the story will already be sliding off the news pages. The judicial secrecy order means the investigators will work in silence for weeks, possibly months. The British tabloids will lose interest the moment there’s no fresh photograph to run. The expat forums will have their theories, most of them wrong and a few of them cruel. And somewhere a family will be trying to work out how a man who went to work on a Wednesday afternoon, to do the job he’d done for twenty years, didn’t come home.

I keep thinking about the two people at the centre of this, who never chose to be in the same story. One is a surgeon, killed in the place where he spent his working life. The other is a young man in a Spanish cell, who may or may not have had anything to do with it, and whose life, either way, will never be ordinary again. If he is eventually cleared, he’ll carry this headline around for years. If he isn’t, then the questions start properly. Who found him? Who paid? Who’s still sitting comfortably in another country, entirely untroubled, because the chain was designed to stop with an eighteen-year-old?

Those questions may never be answered in this case. They very rarely are in the others. That’s rather the point of the model, and it’s why I’ve spent a Saturday morning writing about a shooting I know almost nothing about. The facts of this one belong to the investigators, the courts and the family. The pattern belongs to all of us, and so far we’ve been very good at not looking at it.

I don’t have a tidy ending for you. I’m not sure there is one. Somewhere tonight, a phone will light up with an offer of money for a job, and a teenager will look at it a little longer than he should. The person who sent it won’t lose a minute’s sleep. And the rest of us will read about whatever happens next in a few paragraphs, over coffee, and tell ourselves it’s nothing to do with us.

Until Next Time