Police operations in Södertälje, south of Stockholm, Thursday Jan. 30, 2025, following the shooting of Salwan Momika in an apartment late last night.
| Photo Credit: AP
A Stockholm court on Monday (February 3, 2025) convicted a man of inciting ethnic hatred during four Quran burnings in 2023 that sparked outrage in Muslim countries, a verdict that came just days after the assassination of his co-defendant Salwan Momika.
Momika, a 38-year-old Iraqi Christian, was shot dead late Wednesday in an apartment southwest of Stockholm.
The Stockholm district court was to have published its verdict against Momika and 50-year-old Salwan Najem the following day, but postponed it until Monday after Momika’s killing.
“There is a wide scope within the framework of freedom of expression to be critical of a religion in a factual and objective debate,” judge Goran Lundahl said in a statement.
“At the same time, expressing one’s opinion about religion does not give one a free pass to do or say anything and everything without risking offending the group that holds that belief,” he said.
The court found Najem, 50, guilty of four counts of “agitation against a national or ethnic group”.
He was handed a suspended sentence, which in Sweden means that if he were to commit another crime during a two-year probation period, the court would re-evaluate his sentence.
He was also ordered to pay a fine of 4,000 kronor ($358).
The two men were accused of desecrating the Quran, including by burning it, while making derogatory remarks about Muslims — on two of the occasions outside a Stockholm mosque.
“Even if the motive was to criticise the religion of Islam, the actions and conduct exceeded by a clear margin what constitutes a factual debate and criticism. On all occasions, the demonstrations expressed contempt for the Muslim group,” Lundahl said.
Relations between Sweden and several Middle Eastern countries were strained by the pair’s protests.
Iraqi protesters stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad twice in July 2023, starting fires within the compound on the second occasion.
In August of that year, Sweden’s intelligence service Sapo raised its threat level to four on a scale of one to five, saying the Quran burnings had made the country a “prioritised target”.
Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch called Momika’s murder “a threat to our free democracy”, with Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson saying there was “a risk that there is also a link to a foreign power”.
Five men were arrested in connection with the murder but have since been released.
Published – February 03, 2025 08:54 pm IST
