Sweden says Iran behind 2023 Quran burning hacker attack

Sweden’s prosecutors on Tuesday 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 the Quran.

Sweden’s Prosecution Authority said in a statement that some 15,000 messages “calling for revenge against Quran burners” had been sent in the summer of 2023, following a slew of protests involving desecrations of the Quran.

“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 Guard to carry out an influence campaign.”

“The aim was, among other things, to paint the picture of Sweden as an Islamophobic country,” Fredrik Hallstrom, chief of operations at Sapo, said in a statement.

On August 1, 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 had shown that a group called Anzu team was behind the operation, adding that 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,” senior prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said.

Prisoner swap

In August last year, Sweden’s intelligence service 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 “prioritised 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.