STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -A suspect has been identified in the murder of an anti-Islam campaigner in Sweden in January, the public prosecutor said on Monday, a case that the Swedish prime minister has said might have links to foreign powers.
“We have a good picture of the sequence of events and after extensive technical investigations and review of obtained surveillance footage,” the prosecutor said in a statement. “At present, the suspect’s whereabouts are unknown.”
The statement did not name the suspect.
Court documents obtained by Reuters showed the suspect was a 24-year-old Syrian man who lived in Sweden at the time of the murder. It said Koran-burner Salwan Momika had been shot three times and the killing “had been preceded by careful planning”.
A detention hearing was set for Friday in a district court – a procedure under Swedish law prior to the issuance of an international wanted notice for the suspect.
Momika, an Iraqi refugee who frequently burned and desecrated copies of the Koran at public rallies, was shot dead in a town near Stockholm hours before the verdict in a trial where he stood accused of “offences of agitation against an ethnic or national group”.
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said in January, referring to the killing, that “there is obviously a risk that there is a connection to a foreign power”.
The Koran burnings, seen by Muslims as a blasphemous act as they consider the Koran to be the literal word of God, drew widespread condemnation and complicated Sweden’s NATO accession process, which was eventually completed in 2024.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in 2023 that people who desecrate the Koran should face the “most severe punishment” and that Sweden had “gone into battle array for war on the Muslim world” by allegedly supporting those responsible.
Sweden in 2023 raised its terrorism alert to the second-highest level and warned of threats against Swedes at home and abroad after the Koran burnings. It was lowered back to three on a scale of five earlier this year.
(Reporting by Johan Ahlander; editing by Niklas Pollard and Mark Heinrich)
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