Swedish police mentioned they had been pelted with rocks and dozens of automobiles had been set alight as violent clashes continued within the coastal metropolis of Malmo on Monday, a day after the most recent Quran-burning incident sparked offended protests within the nation.
“I perceive {that a} public gathering like this arouses robust feelings,” senior police officer Petra Stenkula mentioned at a Monday information convention. “However we can not tolerate disturbances and violent expressions like these we noticed on Sunday afternoon.”
The riots started on Sunday when Iraqi refugee Salwan Momika set a replica of the Quran on fireplace in Malmo’s predominantly immigrant Rosengard neighborhood, an space that has seen related flashpoints within the latest previous. No less than 15 individuals had been arrested in the course of the preliminary incident, police mentioned.
Early on Monday, a crowd of largely Muslim youths angered by the desecration of the holy textual content set fireplace to clutter and automobile tires in Rosengard, native media outlet DN mentioned. Experiences additionally indicated that a few of these within the crowd threw scooters and bicycles at police, whereas a number of automobiles had been additionally burned in an underground parking storage in what police described as a “violent riot.”
“Whatever the motive behind these riots, the automobile fires, the harassment, violence in opposition to cops, … whatever the motive, I believe that every one Swedes discover this utterly unacceptable,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Krisersson instructed reporters on Monday.
Momika, a outstanding anti-Islam activist who resides within the Swedish capital of Stockholm, has destroyed copies of the Quran in a sequence of protests not too long ago. Police within the EU nation have permitted the acts beneath its freedom of speech legal guidelines however have additionally mentioned that their transfer to permit the demonstration doesn’t quantity to an endorsement of Momika’s actions.
The spate of Quran-burning incidents in Sweden, in addition to related deliberate protests in its Nordic neighbor, Norway, have led to offended protests in a number of Muslim-majority international locations.
Muslim leaders have known as on Swedish lawmakers to implement measures to forestall additional demonstrations seen as anti-Islam. Whereas Stockholm says that it has no plans to reintroduce blasphemy legal guidelines, which had been dropped within the Seventies, its authorities has mentioned that it’s investigating strategies to reject protest permits for incidents which will result in nationwide safety considerations.
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