AFP — Swedish prosecutors on Thursday sought the arrest a young Syrian man for killing Salwan Momika, who repeatedly burned copies of the Koran in 2023 and sparked outrage in the Muslim world.
Momika, an Iraqi Christian, was shot on January 29 in an apartment in Sodertalje, south of Stockholm. He died soon after in hospital.
“We have a clear picture of the sequence of events, and following extensive technical investigations and a review of the collected surveillance footage, we have requested that a person be remanded in custody,” senior prosecutor Rasmus Oman said in a statement.
Oman added that “at present, the whereabouts of the suspect are unknown.”
A court hearing will be held on Friday.
According to documents filed with the Sodertalje district court, the suspect was a 24-year-old Syrian man.
The prosecutor said the suspect “killed Salwan Momika by shooting him several times with a handgun,” adding that the murder had been extensively planned.
Five men were originally arrested just hours after the shooting but were all released two days later.
They were formally dismissed as suspects in March.
Momika was killed just hours before a Stockholm court was due to rule whether he and co-defendant Salwan Najem were guilty of inciting ethnic hatred.
After Momika’s murder, the Stockholm court postponed its ruling for several days.
It ultimately convicted 50-year-old Najem, also of Iraqi origin, of inciting ethnic hatred during four Koran burnings in 2023. There was no ruling on Momika.
Relations between Sweden and several Middle Eastern countries were strained by the pair’s actions.
Iraqi protesters stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad twice in July 2023, starting fires in the compound on the second occasion.
In August 2023, Sweden’s intelligence service Sapo raised its threat level to four on a scale of one to five, saying the Koran burnings had made the country a “prioritised target”.
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