The shooting this week of 38-year-old Iraqi Christian refugee Salwan Momika might be linked to a foreign power, Stockholm officials have claimed.
Muslim demonstrations erupted across Europe and beyond in recent years as a result of the anti-Islam campaigner’s burning of the Quran. He was shot dead in Södertalje on Wednesday while livestreaming on social media.
The killing came amid what The Wall Street Journal described as “a surge in gang violence in Sweden, which foreign actors have exploited to recruit agents to attack perceived opponents on Swedish soil.”
Five people have been arrested in connection to the shooting, and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on Thursday that “there is obviously a risk that there is a connection to a foreign power.”
Iran is “likely one such suspect,” according to Jason Brodsky, who is policy director at the United Against Nuclear Iran non-profit. Brodsky pointed to Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s 2023 claim that Momika should suffer the “severest punishment” for burning the Quran.
The Swedish government [Khamenei said] should also know that by supporting a criminal, it has taken a war stance against the Islamic world and attracted the hatred and enmity of the Muslim nations and many of their governments.
Swedish deputy PM Ebba Busch said Momika’s killing—“just hours before his sentence was to be announced”—is “a threat to our free democracy. It must be met with the full force of society.”
The irony in the fact that Momika was facing a trial over “offences of agitation against an ethnic or national group”—with implications for Sweden’s free democracy—did not seem to register.
His death has been celebrated by some Muslims living in Europe, including in the Netherlands, where blogger Younes Ouaali gloated that “he will never be able to burn a Quran again.”
British talk show commentator Bushra Shaikh also said after Momika’s killing that Quran burners “should face consequences.” In an apparent attempt to clear up questions raised by this post, she later clarified, “I’m neither sad nor happy that Salwan Momika is dead. I don’t care.”
Writer Andrew Devine responded that neither the radical response to Quran burning of murder, nor the ‘moderate’ response of imprisonment is compatible with Western liberal democracy.
