Germany charges 'IS' supporters with Sweden attack plot

German federal prosecutors on Wednesday charged two men with plotting a shooting near Sweden's parliament in central Stockholm.

They said the plot was meant to be a reaction to cases of Koran burnings in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries last year that made international headlines.

What do prosecutors say? 

Prosecutors allege that one of the men is a member of the so-called "Islamic State," or IS, extremist group, and that the other is a supporter of it, with both aligned to the group since "2023 at the latest." 

They accuse the men, who have Afghan citizenship, of donating money via intermediaries to a branch of the IS group, based primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is known as the Islamic State Khorasan Province and often referred to as ISKP or ISIS-K. 

According to German prosecutors, in the summer of 2023, ISIS-K allegedly ordered the main suspect "to carry out an attack in Europe as a reaction to the Koran burnings taking place in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries" at the time. 

Thereafter, the two men "planned to kill police and other people with firearms in the area around the Swedish parliament." 

German investigators allege that the suspects took "concrete" preparatory steps "in close coordination with [ISIS-K] officials." 

"In particular they researched online about the area surrounding the possible crime scene, and tried several times — if unsuccessfully — to procure weapons," federal prosecutors said in a press release. 

The suspects were arrested in March this year in the eastern German city of Gera and have been in pretrial detention since. 

A court in the central German city of Jena will now decide on how to proceed and whether to schedule a trial for the two men. 

Anger after 2023 Koran burnings in Sweden 

In the summer of 2023 anti-Islam demonstrators, most notably a Christian Iraqi refugee in Sweden, burned copies of the Koran. This led to demonstrations in a series of Muslim countries outside foreign embassies, some of which turned violent. 

Iraqi protesters twice stormed the Swedish embassy, starting fires inside the compound on the second occasion. 

By August of 2023, Sweden's intelligence agency raised its threat level to four on a five-step scale, saying the Koran burnings had made the country a "prioritized target" for extremists.

The events were also used by Turkey, NATO's only majority-Muslim member, as a reason to hold up Sweden's bid to enter the defensive alliance in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 

Sweden earlier this month, for the first time, convicted a Swedish-Danish man on charges of inciting ethnic hatred after he burned a copy of the Muslim holy book.

Swedish prosecutors argue that while the act of burning the book can be a critique of its content or of religion — and as such is protected by the right to free speech — it can also in some contexts be considered "agitation against an ethnic group" and thus a criminal offense. 

msh/lo (AFP, dpa)