Swedish police have authorized a rally on Wednesday June 28 outside Stockholm’s largest mosque, where an organizer plans to burn a copy of the Koran. The event comes on the first day of one of the most important holidays in the Muslim calendar, Eid-el-Kébir. “The police authorize the gathering” because “the security risks” associated with burning the Koran “are not such as to prohibit it”, she wrote in her decision seen by Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The rally will take place at 1:30 p.m. in front of the Great Mosque of Stockholm, where the police are monitoring the area, noted an AFP journalist. The subject is sensitive in Sweden, where a demonstration in January during which a Koran was burned in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm angered Turkey, which is blocking the Scandinavian country’s candidacy for the European Union. NATO.
In his protest request, the organizer of Wednesday’s rally, Salwan Momika, 37, said he wanted to “express [his] opinion about the Quran”. “I will tear up the Quran and burn it,” he wrote.
Two similar gatherings in February refused
The holding of two similar gatherings on February 6 and 9, which were to see copies of the holy book of Islam being burned, had been refused by the Stockholm police, who had invoked the risk of disturbing public order.
Protesters appealed the decision and an administrative tribunal ruled in their favor in early April. In mid-June, the administrative appeals court upheld the first-instance judgment, stating that the security risks alleged by the police “did not have a sufficiently clear link” with the gatherings in question.
It is on this basis that the Swedish police made their decision on Wednesday, just a few days before the Vilnius summit, on July 11 and 12, where Stockholm hopes for progress for its entry into NATO.
