A man burned several pages of a copy of the Koran in front of the largest mosque in Stockholm, Sweden, in a protest authorized by Swedish police on Wednesday, the first day of the Muslim holiday of Aid al Adha. Everything went smoothly and under police surveillance.
A hundred people, including pedestrians, onlookers and journalists, witnessed the burning organized by Salwan Momika, a 37-year-old Iraqi who fled his country and settled in Sweden. Momika stepped on the Muslim holy book before placing slices of bacon between the pages and burning some of them.
“It’s crazy, absolutely crazy. There is only hate behind the terms democracy and freedom,” said Noa Omran, a 32-year-old artist present at the protest.
Hours earlier, the Swedish police reported that they authorized this protest, in which Salwan Momika had already warned that he planned to burn the Koran.
“The police authorize the protest because the security risks are not great enough to prohibit it,” the authorities explained.
In January, the burning of a Koran outside the Turkish embassy in the city sparked weeks of protests and calls for a boycott of Swedish products. The episode also further delayed Sweden’s accession to NATO, which was blocked by Ankara.
In the request for permission to protest on Wednesday, the organizer said he wanted to “express an opinion on the Koran.” The police had banned two similar demonstrations on February 6 and 9, claiming that they represented a risk to public order.
Protesters appealed the decision, and an administrative court ruled in favor of the group in early April. In mid-June, an appeals court upheld the lower court’s ruling.
And it was based on these opinions that the police decided to authorize this latest demonstration, a few days before the NATO meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11 and 12, in which Stockholm hopes to advance the accession process to the Atlantic Alliance. According to the police, the destruction of Korans with fire is a growing phenomenon in the country, which has made Sweden a “priority target of attacks”.
Source: TSF
