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By Chris King • Updated: 06 Jul 2023 • 16:46 • 1 minute read
Image of a Koran holy book. Credit: Mustafa-trit20/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
The Swedish police have received three more requests to hold demonstrations in Stockholm and Helsingborg asking for permission to burn religious books.
According to the SVT TV channel on Wednesday, July 5, one of them involved the burning of a holy Koran in front of the Stockholm mosque, which the organisers wanted to hold ‘as soon as possible’.
The fifty-year-old woman who filed the request told the channel’s correspondent that after the demonstration last week – which also took place near the capital’s mosque – she decided to independently organise a new action.
In her opinion, the protests against Sweden, caused in the world by the burning of the holy book of Muslims, are unfair.
In another application, on July 15, a request was submitted asking for permission to burn both the Torah and the Bible in front of the Israeli embassy.
The applicant, a 30-year-old citizen, insisted that they wanted to perform this action in response to last week’s Koran burning and as a ‘symbolic gathering in the name of freedom of speech’.
A third application asked permission to burn religious texts on July 12 in the centre of Helsingborg. It was also submitted by a private person. What exactly is planned to be set on fire was not yet clear.
Mattias Sigfridsson, the head of the North-West Police Department of Skåne Province, commented: ‘In our view, perhaps this is not directed against any particular religion, but is an integral part of the implementation of freedom of speech and the discussion that is now going on about it’, as reported by tass.ru.
Outrage occurred throughout the Muslim world when a 37-year-old Iraqi citizen was granted permission to burn a Koran last week in Stockholm.
Salwan Momika claimed that he wanted to criticise Islam with the burning. ‘Democracy is in danger if they say we are not allowed to do this’, he said at the time. However, he stressed: ‘I am not making war on Muslims’.
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Originally from Wales, Chris spent years on the Costa del Sol before moving to the Algarve where he is a web reporter for The Euro Weekly News covering international and Spanish national news. Got a news story you want to share? Then get in touch at editorial@euroweeklynews.com
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