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 refugee who became infamous for publicly burning the Koran in Sweden has been shot dead hours before a court verdict on his controversial stunts.