A 38-year-old man with gunshot wounds was found late Wednesday evening in Södertälje, south of Stockholm. According to SVT, the man was Salwan Momika, the organizer of the Quran-burning protests, who died from his injuries.
The Stockholm District Court was scheduled to issue a verdict on charges of inciting hatred on national grounds on Thursday, but the announcement was postponed after the death of one of the defendants was confirmed.
The police have not yet disclosed details of the incident or the identity of the victim. However, SVT reports that the security service is involved in the investigation, and several individuals have been arrested. The crime scene has been cordoned off, and a search is being conducted in the area around a residential building.
Momika, who arrived in Sweden from Iraq in 2018, was granted a three-year residence permit in 2021. In the summer of 2024, his status was extended for another year. The prosecution charged him with inciting hatred based on national grounds related to four incidents of burning the Quran at various locations in Stockholm in the summer of 2023.
Documentary evidence of the crimes includes video recordings from the locations where the protests took place. The first of these occurred on June 28, 2023, in central Stockholm, while Muslims around the world were celebrating the festival of Eid al-Adha (Qurban Bayram). Following a series of such actions, terrorist organizations, including ISIS and Al-Qaeda, identified Sweden as a “priority target,” and the terrorist threat level was raised to four out of five.
