Riot police watch a city bus catch fire on a street in Malmo, Sweden, on Saturday. Unrest broke out in southern Sweden late Saturday, although police moved a protest by an anti-Muslim far-right group, which was planning to burn the Quran among other things, to a new location as a precaution.
Johan Nilsson / AP
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Johan Nilsson / AP
Riot police watch a city bus catch fire on a street in Malmo, Sweden, on Saturday. Unrest broke out in southern Sweden late Saturday, although police moved a protest by an anti-Muslim far-right group, which was planning to burn the Quran among other things, to a new location as a precaution.
Johan Nilsson / AP
HELSINKI (AP) – Swedish police say they fired warning shots during a riot in an eastern city to disperse protesters angry about days of protests by an anti-Muslim group. Danish Church in Sweden. Three people were slightly injured in the clash.
A crowd of about 150 people threw stones at officers and police cars, and set the cars on fire. Police said they responded by firing warning shots and “three people appeared to have been hit” and hospitalized in Norrkoping, which has about 130,000 residents and is about 160 kilometers (100 miles) west of Stockholm. male.
“All three injured people were arrested on suspicion of crime,” police said, adding that none of them were seriously injured.
A photographer for Swedish news agency TT at the scene reported that several riot police were seen carrying an injured man to an ambulance.
The riots broke out after meetings of Danish far-right politician Rasmus Paludan and plans to burn the Quran in various Swedish cities and towns as of Thursday.
Paludan and his Stram Kurs group planned a rally in Norrkoping on Sunday but he never showed up in the city, Swedish media reported. Unrest was also reported in the nearby city of Linkoping.
Paludan said on the party’s Facebook page that he had decided to cancel Sunday’s protests at two locations because Swedish authorities in the region had “shown that they are completely incapable of defending themselves.” protect yourself and me if seriously injured or killed by the incompetence of the police, then it will be very sad for the Swedes, Danes and other northerners.”
In addition to Norrkoping and Linkoping, unrest and violent clashes were reported in Stockholm, Orebro, Landskrona and Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city, in the past three days.
On Friday night, violent clashes between protesters and protesters broke out in the central city of Orebro before Paludan planned to burn the Quran there, injuring 12 policemen. and four police cars caught fire.
In Landskrona, in southern Sweden, several hundred people, mostly young people, threw stones and set cars, tires and trash cans on fire. They also erected barriers to traffic on Saturday night. Similar unrest unfolded in nearby Malmo, where a bus in the city burned, among other things, late on Saturday.
Paludan, a Danish lawyer who also holds Swedish citizenship, founded Stram Kurs, or “Hard Lines,” in 2017. The party’s website, which is active on the anti-immigration and anti-Muslim agenda Church, said “Stram Kurs is the most patriotic political party in Denmark.”
