November 16, 2012

(JTA) — Police in Malmo, Sweden have no suspects in September’s attack on the city’s Jewish community center. 

Anders Lindell, a police spokesman, told JTA that all charges were dropped against the two young men whom police arrested shortly after the Sept. 28 attack.

“We have concluded the suspects could not have done it,” he said. “The investigation is ongoing.” 

The two 18-year-old men were arrested shortly after an explosion was heard outside the city’s community center, which also houses a day school for Jewish children. The bullet-proof entrance door was smashed in the incident.

Police at first declined to define the attack as anti-Semitic, but eventually classified it as a hate crime.

In 2009, unidentified persons set off an explosive device outside the city’s synagogue. In the past few years, approximately 70 anti-Semitic incidents were reported annually in Malmo, a city whose population is 30 to 40 percent Muslim and whose Jewish community is a few hundred strong. 

Malmo’s mayor, Ilmar Reepalu, has equated Zionism to anti-Semitism, has said that the Jewish community had been infiltrated by extreme rightists and has advised Jews not to support Israel for their own safety.

The per capita prevalence of anti-Semitic incidents in Malmo is twice that of Stockholm, the capital.

There have been a number of marches to protest anti-Semitism in recent months, drawing both Jews and non-Jews and in one case, Reepalu.

Earlier this week, the Swedish Committee Against Antisemitism, an NGO, recognized with an award Siavosh Derakhti, a 21-year-old Muslim from Malmo who filmed an educational trip he had made to Auschwitz.

Derakhti has screened the video in Swedish schools in an effort to educate young Swedes about the Holocaust. 

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