Sweden points to ‘foreign power’ after Iraqi refugee on trial for Qur’an burnings shot dead
Five held after Salwan Momika was reportedly killed during TikTok live stream, hours before trial verdict due
Thu 30 Jan 2025 12.22 GMT
Five people have been arrested after an Iraqi refugee and anti-Islam campaigner was shot dead in Sweden hours before a court verdict was due in his trial over burning the Qur’an, police said.
In an attack that the prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, said could be linked to “a foreign power”, Salwan Momika, 38, was shot late on Wednesday in a house in the town of Södertälje, near Stockholm. In 2023 Momika outraged many people in Sweden and around the world by burning copies of the Qur’an in public demonstrations.
A Stockholm court had been due pass judgment on Momika and another man on Thursday in a criminal trial over “offences of agitation against an ethnic or national group”, but said the verdict had been postponed.
Yoon’s self-inflicted downfall a blow to US strategy in East Asia
South Korea: anatomy of a coup gone wrong
President Yoon Suk-yeol’s December coup was over within hours, but it wasn’t an impulsive act. Details soon emerged of careful planning and a readiness to risk confrontation with North Korea to bring it off.
On 3 December President Yoon Suk-yeol abruptly left a cabinet meeting with no explanation. Most of his colleagues only discovered why when they heard him making a televised address from an adjoining room, announcing South Korea’s 17th – and fortunately shortest – period of martial law since it was established in 1948.
The logic seemed watertight to Yoon: if an opposition-controlled National Assembly thwarts a president – for example, by refusing to pass a budget his administration has called for – this is an affront to universal suffrage and the constitution. It didn’t matter that these parliamentarians had been elected or that the opposition’s majority in the assembly stemmed primarily from the president’s unpopularity. In Yoon’s worldview, a parliament either obeys or must be overturned.
Kagame says South Africa not equipped to mediate in DRC, warns of confrontation
By Des Erasmus
Rwanda President Paul Kagame issued a stark warning to South Africa late on Wednesday night, accusing President Cyril Ramaphosa and his government of distorting facts about the ongoing conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and suggesting that Rwanda is prepared for confrontation if necessary.
“What has been said about [the conversations I had with Ramaphosa this week] in the media by South African officials and President Ramaphosa himself contains a lot of distortion, deliberate attacks, and even lies.
“If words can change so much from a conversation to a public statement, it says a lot about how these very important issues are being managed,” Kagame said in a post on his X account, in reply to Ramaphosa’s posted statement.
Afghan refugees bat for recognition and women’s rights in Melbourne match
Of the 25 Afghan women contracted by the country’s cricket board in 2020, most resettled in Australia with humanitarian visas, starting new lives in Melbourne and other cities.
A few miles from the Melbourne Cricket Ground where Australia and England started the women’s Ashes test on Thursday, a group of Afghan refugee cricketers played their first match as a team since fleeing Taliban rule.
The players of the Afghanistan Women’s XI were among hundreds of athletes who fled their home nation when the Taliban returned to power in 2021, bringing sweeping restrictions on women.
Russia focuses on seizing Ukraine’s Pokrovsk amid reports of heavy losses
Russia concentrates on the Donetsk region hoping for a decisive breakthrough, as Ukraine claims Moscow has lost almost 835,000 men.
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