The Swedish prime minister said the shooting of an anti-Islam campaigner just hours before a trial verdict was due on Thursday over his burning the Koran might be linked to a foreign power, and police arrested five people over the killing.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said in 2023 that Sweden had gone into “battle-array for war on the Muslim world” by supporting “the criminal”, and that “all Islamic scholars agree that those who desecrate the Koran deserved the most severe punishment”.

An anti-Islam protester who carried out several Quran burnings was shot dead in his apartment in Sweden, according to local media.