Today, Monday, a British court convicted a person who burned a copy of the Noble Qur’an in front of the Turkish consulate in London by committing a religious crime that violates public order, in a ruling that his critics said that he re -worked with a canceled law.
Hamid Koscon, 50, was sentenced to pay a fine of 240 pounds ($ 325) in the Westminster Partial Court in London after being convicted of provoking chaos with his humiliating screaming against Islam while carrying a copy of the Qur’an burning near the consulate in central London last February.
Coscon’s lawyer, who was born to a Kurdish father and an Armenian mother, and lives in central England, argued that the trial amounts to an attempt to restore the rowing law that was canceled in the United Kingdom in 2008.
Try to burn the Koran and receive a severe beating 🥊
A man receiving strikes and kicks by an elderly person who brought him to the ground after he burned a copy of the Qur’an in front of the headquarters of the Turkish embassy in London pic.twitter.com/n6tbxh717f
– Britain in Arabic (@theukar) February 13, 2025
Koscon had denied the charge, and said on social media that he was protesting against the Turkish government.
“Burning a religious book, although it is offensive to some, is not necessarily chaos,” press reports quoted Judge John McGarva as saying.
He added that what made Coscon behavior be chaotic is the timing and place of behavior, and that all this was accompanied by abusive words, as “there was no reason to use the word of the curse and direct it to Islam.”
The Secular National Assembly also claimed that the trial is a “great blow to freedom of expression”, an opinion that the main opposition Conservative Party repeated, according to Reuters.
The platforms on the communication sites circulated last February a scene documenting a person burning a copy of the Qur’an in front of the headquarters of the Turkish embassy in London, before an elderly intervened to confront him.
