DANISH MUSLIMS FROWN AT CEMETERY DEFILING
Copenhagen, 21 Shaban 1436/8 June 2015 (MINA) – The Danish Muslim community have vented anger over the desecration of several Muslim graves in a cemetery in western Copenhagen suburb of Brøndby, as some politicians questioned the police negligent reaction to the crime.
“A Muslim cemetery is vandalized but police don’t see it as politically motivated? Why?” Socialist People’s Party MP Özlem Cekic wrote on Twitter, The Local.dk reported on Sunday, June 7.
According to police spokesman Kim Madsen, the Muslim cemetery was vandalized late on Friday by unknown assailants, On Islam quoted by Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA) as reporting.
Aggrieved by the attack on their dear ones graves, a banner was displayed by some families reading: “To the racists. We didn’t get peace from you in our lives, let us have peace from you in our deaths!”
Briefing media on Saturday, he said that some 50 graves were vandalized and numerous tombstones were destroyed and strewn over the burial grounds.
“We don’t consider this to be something aimed at the Muslim community, there isn’t anything to indicate that. It looks like a prank in which someone went out there and just knocked them down,” Kim Madsen told Ekstra Bladet.
A Muslim MP has shown his displeasure at the negligence displayed by the police towards the desecration of the Muslim cemetery, viewing the action as a likely “prank”.
The vandalism “comes after a period of attacks on women with head scarves, vandalism of mosques and a growing hatred of Muslims online,” Social Liberal (Radikale) MP Zenia Stampe wrote on Facebook, questioning why the police weren’t taking the incident more seriously.
“A policeman talked about this as ‘a prank’. I am very angry about the use of that word,” Stampe wrote in a comment to her own Facebook post.
Top Priority
Facing increasing criticism, police said that they were giving the desecration top priority later on Saturday.
“We consider this to be political-religious vandalism and we are investigating it and giving it all the attention we can. It has been given high priority and so that this doesn’t develop any further, we have put patrols in place at the Muslim cemetery,” Inspector Bjarne Nisted from Copenhagen Vestegn Police told Politiken.
So far, police have failed to find any definitive proof to indicate the reason behind the attack.
“We haven’t found anything that indicates what kind of motive was behind it or who could be responsible for the destruction,” Nisted told Politiken.
“On the other hand, it is unlikely that the location was chosen randomly and those who carried out the vandalism may have had their own crazy agenda.”
Islam is Denmark’s second largest religion after the Lutheran Protestant Church, which is actively followed by four-fifths of the country’s population.
Denmark is home to a Muslim minority of 200,000, making three percent of the country’s 5.4 million population.
Across the Nordic region, anti-immigration parties, which languished after Norwegian far-rightist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in 2011, are gaining support.
In December 2013, Danish People’s Party (DPP) announced its plans to vote against the bi-annual citizenship law that grants hundreds of Muslims the Danish citizenship.
The far-right party claimed that “too many” Muslim immigrants were not welcomed in Denmark. (T/P011/R03)
Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)
