STOCKHOLM: Swedish prosecutors on Wednesday charged a Swedish-Danish right-wing activist with inciting ethnic hatred by desecrating and burning a Qur'an in 2022.
Rasmus Paludan, who has been convicted for racist abuse in the past, provoked rioting in Sweden in 2022 when he went on a tour of the country and publicly burned copies of the Qur'an.
Prosecutors charged him with “agitation against an ethnic group” over a protest in the city of Malmo in April 2022 where he desecrated and set fire to the Muslim holy book, while making disparaging comments about Muslims, according to the charge sheet.
They also charged him with a second count of the same offense over another incident where he made derogatory remarks about Arabs and Africans.
Paludan later stoked international controversy when he set fire to a Qur'an outside Turkiye’s embassy in the Swedish capital in January 2023.
The incident strained relations between the country at a time when Turkiye was holding up Sweden’s NATO bid.
Relations between Sweden and several Middle Eastern countries were further strained by a slew of protests staged by Iraqi refugee Salwan Momika — which also included desecrations of the Qur'an — over the summer of 2023.
Iraqi protesters stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad twice in July of that year, starting fires within the compound on the second occasion.
In August last year, Sweden’s intelligence service Sapo raised its threat level to four on a scale of five after the Qur'an burnings had made it a “prioritized target.”
The Swedish government condemned the desecrations while noting the country’s constitutionally protected freedom of speech and assembly laws.
In October 2023, a Swedish court convicted a man of inciting ethnic hatred with a 2020 Qur'an burning, the first time the country’s court system had tried the charge for desecrating Islam’s holy book.
The man published the video on social media platforms Twitter, now known as X, and YouTube, and placed the burnt Qur'an with bacon outside the mosque in the city of Linkoping.
The video featured a song the court said was “strongly associated with the attack in Christchurch,” New Zealand, in 2019 in which an Australian white supremacist killed 51 people at two mosques.
Prosecutors have told Swedish media that under Swedish law the burning of a Qur'an can be seen as a critique of the book and the religion and thus be protected under free speech.
However, depending on the context and what statements are made at the time it can also be considered “agitation against an ethnic group.”
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