Swedish police said on Wednesday morning they had authorized a demonstration in which a man will burn a copy of the Koran, Islam’s sacred text, in front of Stockholm’s main mosque. The request to organize the demonstration was presented in February by Salwan Momika, a man of Iraqi origin residing in Sweden with asylum seeker status: Momika had said he wanted to burn the Koran in public because according to him the book would represent “a danger to democratic laws and for Swedish and human values”.
The demonstration was initially banned by the police for possible security risks, but two weeks ago a Swedish court decided to overturn the police decision, following an appeal by Momika, arguing that the security risks were not such as to prevent the right to burn the Koran. The demonstration will begin at 13:30 and it is feared that there may be riots and accidents near the mosque.
In January there had been a similar demonstration in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm, when right-wing extremist Rasmus Paludan had burned the Koran: that fire had caused major controversy and protests in Turkey, and the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan had threatened that he would not ratify Sweden’s entry into NATO, which he has been opposing for months accusing the Swedish government of supporting and welcoming members of some Kurdish organizations that Turkey (as well as most Western countries) deems terrorist .
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