Well over 300 rioters were on Malmö’s Amiralsgatan street, south of the Rosengård Centrum shopping centre, smashing bus shelters, overturning lampposts and destroying billboards.
“There’s been a massive rain with stones, street signs — they’re broken off anything you can throw and thrown it in the road,” Thomas Söderberg, from the Malmö police, told the TT newswire.
The riot started at around 7pm and continued up until 3am in the morning.
Police blocked off the street at the crossroads with Norra Grängebergsgatan, with the police presence increasing through the night until there were dozens of vans, several of which were armoured riot vans.
Rioters pelted the police with stones, street furniture, burnt tyres and fired off fireworks, flares and bangers.
According to Malmö police, about 15 suspected rioters were arrested during the night, all of whom were released on Saturday morning. A few officers were lightly wounded in the onslaught, none seriously.
“No member of the public has been wounded, but a few police officers are lightly wounded. Things have just been raining down on them,” Söderberg told TT.
Patric Fors, another police spokesperson, said that police would be out on the streets of Rosengård on Saturday morning.
“We have kept checks out there during the night but it remained calm, now this morning we’re going to put in place confidence-building measures. Police will be moving around on feed, and talking with residents,” he told the Sydsvenskan newspaper.
The demonstration was connected to an incident earlier in the day in which protesters from Denmark’s far-right Hard Line (Stram Kurs) party burned a copy of the Islamic holy book in the Malmö district of Emilstorp.
Rasmus Paludan, who leads the far-right Danish anti-immigration party Hard Line, was due to travel to Malmo to speak at that event, which was being held on the same day as weekly prayers for the Muslim sabbath.
But authorities pre-empted Paludan’s arrival by announcing he had been banned from entering Sweden for two years. He was later arrested near Malmo.
“We suspect that he was going to break the law in Sweden,” Calle Persson, spokesman for the police in Malmo told AFP. “There was also a risk that his behaviour… would pose a threat to society.”
But his supporters went ahead with a rally in Malmö’s main Stortorget square, three of whom were arrested for hate crime after they desecrated a copy of the Koran by kicking it around the square like a football.
Paludan later put up a scathing message on Facebook.
“Sent back and banned from Sweden for two years. However, rapists and murderers are always welcome!” he wrote.
Paludan last year attracted media attention for burning a Koran wrapped in bacon — a meat that is anathema for Muslims.
Samir Muric, a Malmö imam, condemned the rioters on his Facebook page.
“Those who are acting in this way have nothing to do with Islam,” he wrote. Their shouts filled with ‘la ilaha ill Allah’ and ‘Allahu Akbar’ are just outbursts that they do not mean, because if they really meant that, they wouldn’t have acted like this.”
He said he was against all forms of burning “whether it’s of the Koran or of tyres and crates”.
Source:thelocal.se/