An Iraqi man who triggered violent international protests when he burned a Quran in Stockholm in 2023 has been shot dead in Sweden, a killing the country’s prime minister suggested could be linked to a foreign power.
Salwan Momika, a 38-year-old refugee and anti-Islam activist, was attacked in his apartment late on Wednesday. The killing appears to have happened while he was livestreaming on TikTok.
It is unclear whether his death was captured on camera, but a viewer of the stream was alarmed enough to alert the police, according to a person familiar with the events. In a video circulating online, a person who appears to be a Swedish police officer turns off the stream after Momika’s death.
Swedish police arrested five suspects hours after the killing. The suspects were between 20 and 60 years old, and several of them lived in the neighborhood, according to Swedish media.
Momika was due to appear in court on Thursday to hear the verdict in a trial where he stood accused of inciting ethnic hatred through his Quran burnings. After the killing, the other defendant in the case, Salwan Najem, posted on X: “I’m next.”
The killing comes amid a surge in gang violence in Sweden, which foreign actors have exploited to recruit agents to attack perceived opponents on Swedish soil.
“I can guarantee that the security services are deeply involved, because there is clearly a risk of connection to a foreign power,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said at a press conference Thursday. He didn’t specify which foreign power might be involved.
Momika arrived in Sweden as an atheist refugee from Iraq in 2021. His inflammatory rhetoric pushed the historically liberal and tolerant Scandinavian nation into a tricky balancing act, forcing it to weigh national-security interests against freedom of speech.
In 2023 Momika staged numerous protests, in which he burned and stomped on the Quran. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cited the protests, which he considered blasphemous, as a reason for delaying the approval of Sweden’s bid for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The incidents prompted violent protests in the Middle East. A crowd stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad. Iraq expelled Sweden’s ambassador, banned business with Sweden and canceled work permits for staff at Swedish telecommunications multinational Ericsson.
Momika lived under police protection for months after the Quran burning, even as the Swedish government openly condemned his actions as provocative. In late 2023, Sweden revoked his residency, saying he had made false statements in his asylum application after it emerged that he had been a leader of a Christian militia in Iraq. Momika left Sweden to apply for asylum in Norway, stating in his application that if he were to return to Sweden, and be deported to Iraq, his life would be in danger. He returned to Sweden last year after Norway rejected his asylum request.
From his base in Sweden, Momika published videos on TikTok—often a source of significant income for prolific users—that were shared widely among accounts that used his anti-Islam propaganda to reinforce their own anti-Western messaging. After his Quran burnings, Arabic and Russian-language social media channels used the incidents as springboards to spread misinformation, including claims that Sweden endorsed the desecrations of Islam’s holy book.
Momika was shot dead in his apartment in Södertälje, a city 25 miles southwest of Stockholm that has been one of the most crime-ridden parts of the country in recent years.
Sweden, a historically peaceful Scandinavian welfare state, now has the highest gun-murder rate per capita in the European Union. Swedish authorities have accused Iran in particular of using the surge in violence to recruit hit men, including minors, to target Tehran’s enemies.
Swedish police have arrested at least two young teenagers with connections to local gangs for attempting to attack the Israeli embassy in Stockholm. Danish police have accused a Swedish gang of being behind an explosion at the Israeli embassy in Copenhagen as well.
