Swedish prosecutors have accused Iran’s intelligence service of hacking an SMS operator in 2023 to send messages encouraging people to take revenge on protesters who had burned copies of the Qur’an.
On Tuesday, Sweden’s prosecution authority claimed that 15,000 messages “calling for revenge” were sent in the summer of 2023 after a slew of protests involving desecrations of the Qur’an. “The aim was to create division in Swedish society,” the authority said.
In a separate statement, Sweden’s intelligence service, Sapo, said it had determined that a hacker group had acted “on behalf of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to carry out an influence campaign.”
Fredrik Hallström, the chief of operations at Sapo, said: “The aim was, among other things, to paint the picture of Sweden as an Islamophobic country.”
The justice minister, Gunnar Strömmer, said the government could “not tolerate other countries engaging in such activities against Sweden.”
“That a state actor, in this case Iran, according to the Security Police’s assessment, is behind an action that aims to destabilise Sweden or increase polarisation in our country is of course very serious,” he said.
On 1 August 2023, Swedish media reported that a large number of people had received text messages calling for revenge against people who had burned the Muslim holy book.
According to prosecutors, an investigation found that a group called the Anzu Team was allegedly behind the operation. They said the investigation had been closed as it was deemed unlikely that it would be possible to bring the suspects to justice.
“Since the actors are acting on behalf of a foreign power, in this case Iran, our assessment is that the conditions necessary to bring charges abroad or an extradition to Sweden are missing for those suspected of being behind the attack,” said Mats Ljungqvist, a senior prosecutor.
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.
Sapo raised its threat level to four on a scale of five that August, saying Sweden was a “prioritised target”.
The Swedish government condemned the desecrations while noting the country’s constitutionally protected freedom of speech and assembly laws.
Sweden and Iran’s relations have been particularly strained in recent years, with one of the main sticking points being Sweden’s arrest and conviction of an Iranian former prisons official, Hamid Noury.
Noury 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, Johan Floderus, and Saeed Azizi, a Swedish national arrested in Iran in November 2023.
