Sweden says Iran was behind mass text messages calling for revenge over Quran burnings
Officials say Islamic Revolutionary Guard breached major Swedish text messaging company, sent out 15,000 messages aiming to ‘destabilize’ country
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Swedish authorities accused Iran on Tuesday of being responsible for thousands of text messages that were sent to people in the Scandinavian country calling for revenge over the burnings of Islam’s holy book in 2023.
Officials in Stockholm claimed that Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guards carried out “a data breach” and managed to send “some 15,000 text messages in Swedish” over the string of public burnings of the Quran.
Senior prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said that a preliminary investigation, carried out by Sweden’s SAPO domestic security agency, showed that “it was the Iranian state via the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC, that carried out a data breach at a Swedish company that runs a major SMS service.”
The Swedish company was not named. There was no immediate comment from Iranian authorities on the accusations from Sweden.
In August 2023, Swedish media reported that a large number of people in Sweden had received text messages in Swedish calling for revenge against people who were burning the Quran. Ljungqvist said the sender of the messages was “a group calling itself the Anzu team.”
Swedish broadcaster SVT published a photo of a text message saying that “those who desecrated the Quran must have their work covered in ashes” and calling Swedes “demons.”
The protests were held under the freedom of speech act, which is protected under the Swedish constitution. The rallies were approved by police. However, the incidents left Sweden torn between its commitment to free speech and its respect for religious minorities.
In a separate statement, SAPO’s operational manager Fredrik Hallström said the text messages’ intent was to also “paint the image of Sweden as an Islamophobic country and create division in society.”
He accused “foreign powers” of seeking to “exploit vulnerabilities” and said they were “now acting more and more aggressively, and this is a development that is likely to escalate.” He did not name any specific country.
Meanwhile, Sweden’s justice minister, Gunnar Strömmer, told Swedish news agency TT “that a state actor, in this case Iran, according to [SAPO’s) assessment is behind an action that aims to destabilize Sweden or increase polarization in our country, is of course very serious.”
There is no law in Sweden specifically prohibiting the burning or desecration of the Quran or other religious texts. Like many Western countries, Sweden doesn’t have any blasphemy laws.
“Since the actors are acting for a foreign power, in this case Iran, we make the assessment that the conditions for prosecution abroad or extradition to Sweden are lacking for the persons suspected of being behind the breach, “Ljungqvist said.
Ljungqvist, who is with Sweden’s top prosecution authority, said that although the preliminary investigation has been closed, it “does not mean that the suspected hackers have been completely written off,” and that the probe could be reopened.
In August last year, SAPO raised its threat level to four on a scale of five after a series of protests that included Quran burnings had made the country a “prioritized target.”
Relations between Sweden and several Middle Eastern countries were strained by the protests which were concentrated over the summer of 2023.
Iraqi protesters stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad twice in July of that year, starting fires within the compound on the second occasion.
The Swedish government condemned the desecrations while noting the country’s constitutionally protected freedom of speech and assembly laws.
Sweden and Iran’s relations in particular have also been strained in recent years, with one of the main sticking points being Sweden’s arrest and conviction of Hamid Noury.
Noury, an Iranian former prisons official, was arrested at Stockholm airport in November 2019 and sentenced to life in prison in July 2022 for his role in mass killings in Iranian jails in 1988.
In June, the countries announced a prisoner swap in which Noury was released in Sweden in exchange for a European Union diplomat and a second Swede.
The two Swedes were EU diplomat Johan Floderus and Saeed Azizi, a Swedish national arrested in Iran in November 2023.
Floderus had meanwhile been held in Iran since April 2022, accused of espionage, for which he risked a death sentence.
In May, SAPO also said that Iran was recruiting Swedish criminal gang members, some of them children, as proxies to commit “acts of violence” against Israeli and other interests in Sweden.
