As Muslims celebrate Eid al-Adha from this Wednesday, June 28, in Sweden, a controversy is mounting. The police authorized a rally, scheduled for early afternoon, in front of Stockholm’s largest mosque. During this event, an organizer plans to burn a copy of the Koran. “The police authorize the gathering” because “the security risks” associated with burning the Quran “are not such as to prohibit it”, she wrote in her decision consulted by Agence France- Press.
The rally will take place at 1:30 p.m. (11:30 GMT) in front of the Great Mosque in Stockholm, where police are monitoring the area, an AFP journalist noted.
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, aroused the anger of Turkey, which is blocking the Scandinavian country’s candidacy for NATO.
In his request for a demonstration seen by AFP, the organizer of Wednesday’s rally, Salwan Momika, 37, said he wanted to “express [his] opinion about the Koran”. “I will tear up the Quran and burn it,” he wrote.
In mid-June, the Administrative Court of Appeal upheld the first instance judgment, stating that the security risks put forward 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.
