Sweden accuses Iran of 2023 hacker attack following Koran burning incident

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 Koran.

Sweden's Prosecution Authority said in a statement that some 15,000 messages "calling for revenge against Koran burners" had been sent in the summer of 2023, following a slew of protests involving desecrations of the Muslim holy book.

"The aim was to create division in Swedish society," the authority said.

Iran was quick to dismiss the accusations.

"The Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Stockholm considers the accusations to be baseless and rejects them," Iran's Tasnim news agency reported.

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.

"The fact that a state actor, in this case, Iran, is behind an action aimed at destabilizing Sweden or increasing polarisation in our country is of course very serious," Justice Minister Gunnar Strommer told AFP in a written comment.

Strommer noted that Sweden's intelligence service considered "Iran to be one of the countries that pose the greatest threat to Sweden, including by spreading disinformation".

Iran's embassy in Stockholm accused Sweden of harming bilateral relations by publishing the accusations.

"The embassy believes that making these claims and publishing them in the media poison and affect the atmosphere of relations between the two countries," Tasnim said.

 Prisoner swap  

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 Koran, considered by many Muslims to contain the word of God.

According to prosecutors, an investigation had shown that a group called the Anzu team was behind the operation, but the investigation was closed because it was deemed unlikely that the suspects could be brought to justice.

"Since the actors are acting on behalf of a foreign power, in this case, Iran, we assess 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.

In August last year, Sapo raised its threat level to four on a scale of five after a series of protests that included Koran burnings had made the country a "prioritized target".

Relations between Sweden and several Middle Eastern countries were strained by the protests 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 former Iranian prison 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 Sweden released Noury in exchange for European Union diplomat Johan Floderus and Saeed Azizi, a Swedish national arrested in Iran in November 2023.

Floderus, a Swede, had 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.