Police fired at a riot in Sweden. How did it get to that point?

Police fired warning shots during a riot in Sweden on Easter weekend, the latest clash in a series of violent demonstrations across the country in recent days.

Three people were injured, none seriously, during clashes in Norrkoping, a city of about 130,000 people, roughly 160 kilometers southwest of Stockholm.

Unrest and violent clashes have been reported elsewhere, too, including in Stockholm, Orebro, Landskrona and Malmo – Sweden’s third-largest city – in the past three days.

But what was the spark that caused this explosion of unrest? Here’s what we know.

There are two groups involved in the unrest: anti-Islam demonstrators and counter-protesters. The two sides have been facing off across Sweden since Thursday as a result of Danish far-right politician Rasmus Paludan’s planned meetings and Quran burnings throughout the country.

Paludan’s Swedish tour comes ahead of the September elections in Denmark. Paludan ran under the banner of his Stram Kurs party — which he established in 2017 to push an anti-immigration and anti-Islam agenda — in the last Danish elections in 2019. It failed to win a seat, securing just 1.8 per cent of the vote, according to the BBC.

As things stand now, Paludan reportedly does not yet have the number of signatures he needs to secure his candidacy in the September elections.

The Easter weekend demonstrations then are meant to galvanize support and after Paludan was given permission, locals took to the streets to push back against his hateful rhetoric.

The result has been a series of escalating counter-protests and widespread unrest.

A key concern among the counter-protesters has been Paludan’s Islamophobia. In June of 2020, Danish courts gave Paludan a month in jail for a number of offences, including racism.

Now, his Swedish pre-election tour includes plans to burn the Quran.

People who practice Islam widely regard burning the Quran as a blasphemous and offensive act, as evidenced by massive protests that have historically been sparked when someone desecrates the text in this way.

Paludan has been livestreaming and profiting from the Quran’s desecration for years.

Paludan and his Stram Kurs party had planned a demonstration in Norrkoping on Sunday — but he never showed up in the city, Swedish media reported.

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On the party’s Facebook page, Paludan said he decided to cancel Sunday’s demonstrations in Norrkoping and the nearby city of Linkoping.

He blamed the decision on the Swedish authorities, who he claimed have “shown that they are completely incapable of protecting themselves and me. If I was seriously injured or killed due to the inadequacy of the police authority, then it would be very sad for Swedes, Danes and other northerners.”

Still, Swedes took to the streets in Norrkoping prepared to push back Paludan’s supporters. Tensions escalated at the demonstration, and the crowd of about 150 people eventually began to pelt police with stones and set fire to cars, which law enforcement said prompted them to fire warning shots at the crowd.

A photographer for Swedish news agency TT at the scene reported that several riot police officers were seen carrying a wounded man to an ambulance.

“Three people seem to have been hit by ricochets and are now being cared for in hospital. All three injured are arrested on suspicion of crime,” police said in an online statement, adding that none of the injuries were life-threatening.

All three of those injured were “arrested on suspicion of crime.”

Unrest and violent clashes have been reported in Stockholm, Orebro, Landskrona and Malmo in the past three days as Paludan has conducted his tour of the country.

On Friday evening, violent clashes between demonstrators and counter-protesters erupted in the central city of Orebro before Paludan’s plan to burn a Quran there, leaving 12 police officers injured and four police vehicles set ablaze.

In Landskrona, in southern Sweden, a few hundred people threw stones and set cars, tires and dustbins on fire. They also erected a barrier fence that obstructed traffic on Saturday evening. Similar unrest took place in nearby Malmo, where a city bus was set on fire, among other things, late Saturday.

In some places, counter-protesters attacked police ahead of the planned right-wing extremist demonstrations, Reuters reported.

Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson has condemned the violence.

— With files from the Associated Press, Reuters