STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -A Swedish court found an anti-Islam campaigner guilty on Monday of hate crimes involving staging public burnings of the Koran, in a ruling handed down five days after another man also being prosecuted over the incidents was shot dead.
Salwan Najem, a 50-year-old Swedish citizen, was given a suspended sentence and fined 4,000 crowns ($358) over the Koran burnings and derogatory comments he made about Muslims in the 2023 incidents, which led to unrest and caused anger towards Sweden in Muslim countries.
His fellow campaigner, Iraqi refugee Salwan Momika, was shot dead last week on the day he had been due to receive his verdict in a parallel case.
No suspect has been charged yet in that killing. Five people were detained but later released. Sweden’s prime minister has said a foreign state may have been behind it.
The 2023 Koran burnings made the balance between free speech rights and rules protecting ethnic and religious groups a major issue for Sweden and other European countries.
The Stockholm district court said Sweden had extensive free speech rights and that followers of a religion must accept that they would sometimes feel offended, but that Najem and Momika had “by a wide margin” overstepped the mark for reasonable and factual religious criticism.
The court found that the pair had desecrated the Koran in various ways and made offensive and sweeping statements directed towards Islam, representatives of the religion and activities in mosques.
The court said the Koran did not have any special protection just because it was a holy scripture for Muslims and that there could be cases where burning was not considered a hate crime.
Najem was found guilty of hate crimes for “having expressed contempt for the Muslim ethnic group because of their religious beliefs on four occasions”, it said.
Najem’s lawyer said he would appeal against the verdict.
“My client considers that his statements fall within the scope of criticism of religion, which is covered by the freedom of expression,” he said.
The court had dropped the case against Momika after he was killed.
($1 = 11.1828 Swedish crowns)
(Reporting by Johan Ahlander Anna Ringstrom, additional reporting by Isabelle Carlsson, Editing by Stine Jacobsen, Peter Graff and Angus MacSwan)
