More than one hundred million dollars from Swedish taxpayers has been stolen by Islamist, Muslim Brotherhood-linked imams who ran private schools across Sweden, according to an investigation by the Swedish newspaper Expressen.
The investigation found that the network embezzled more than one billion Swedish kronor through welfare funds and school voucher programs. The money was funneled out of schools that were publicly funded but allegedly operated as part of an organized fraud scheme tied to Islamist extremism.
Police raided an apartment north of Stockholm connected to individuals linked to Islamist extremism while searching for Rabie Karam, who was identified as one of the central figures in the school network accused of spreading radical Islam. Karam was convicted in 2024 and is wanted to serve an eight-month prison sentence.
One of the most prominent cases involved a school in Gothenburg that received approximately 462 million kronor in public funding. The school’s leadership included Abdirizak Waberi, a former member of parliament who served as the school’s principal. Investigators found that Waberi illegally transferred around 12 million kronor to sex clubs in Thailand, as well as luxury hotels and to support his own Islamist political party in Somalia. He did so by sending fake IT invoices.
Another school owner in Gothenburg, who employed former Islamic State terrorists who had returned to Sweden, allegedly stole millions of kronor by transferring School funds to accounts in Malta.
One of the leaders behind the network was identified as Imam Abo Raad. He was taken into custody by the Swedish Security Service in 2019 and was deemed a threat to national security. The government decided he should be deported, but the removal was not carried out due to conditions in his home country of Iraq. He later left Sweden on his own.
Authorities have since shut down the schools linked to the network. In some cases, closures followed direct intervention by security officials, while in others they resulted from financial crime investigations that uncovered large-scale economic fraud tied to the operations.
