User:E.M.Gregory/2011 Gothenburg assassination attempt

The 2011 Gothenburg  was an alleged Islamism inspired plan to murder Danish cartoonist Lars Vilks at a party celebrating the opening of the 2011 Gothenburg International Art Biennial in the Röda Sten Contemporary Art Space on September 11, 2011. Swedish artist Lars Vilks was expected to attend the event and was reported to be the target.

Police evacuated 400 party-goers from the art gallery and initially arrested four men suspected of plotting a terror attack nearby.

Suspicions of Islamist motivation were aroused by the fact that the alleged attack was said to have been planned of the 10th anniversary of the 2001 September 11 attacks.

This alleged plot came to renewed international attention three years after the trial and acquittal because Vilks was the target of the 2015 Copenhagen shootings.

Incident
Suspects shown at trial to have been carrying knives and to have inquired about Vilks presence at the Art Biennial event at the Röda Sten Contemporary Art Space. Unknown to the three was the fact that they were being shadowed by an undercover police officer as they approached the venue. The three were described as Tareq, is chairman of the Göteborg Multicultural Youth Center, Samir, a sports director at the Multicultural Youth Center, and Abdul, who frequented the Bellevue Mosque, located next door to the Youth Center.

The suspects were of Somali and Iraqi origin.

The three asserted that they were carrying the knives to defend themselves in case they happened to be attacked, or in case they needed ot cut meat at dinner. According to the Combating Terrorism Center one of the knives had been provided by Khaled SigSauer, a friend of two of the suspects known to have traveled to Syria by 2013 anto to have become a fighter and militant jihadist group.

Investigation
Tareq's personal computer contained films praising praising suicide bombers and teh jihadist gorup Al-Shabab and celebrating violent jihad, along with calls to "slay" Lars Vilks and offering a$150,000.00 bounty to his "slaughterer." The offer of $150,000 for the murder of Vilks was made by the Islamic State.

Lars Vilks
Lars Vilks, a Swedish artist whose planned attendance at the gallery opening has been announced, has been the target of Islamist threats and attacks since he published a series of cartoons of Muhammad in 2007.

Vilks' Muhammad cartoons inspired suicide bomber Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly to commit the 2010 Stockholm bombings. An email received by Swedish media before the Stockholm suicide bombing read, in part:""Now your children, daughters and sisters will die in the same way our brothers and sisters die. Our actions will speak for themselves. As long as you don't end your war against Islam and degradation against the prophet and your foolish support for the pig [Lars] Vilks."

Vilks was the target of the 2015 Copenhagen shootings.

Legal proceedings
A 26-year-old Somali living in Sweden and two Swedes, 24 and 26 years old were charged with planning to stab Vilks to death. All three were carrying knives while they were arrested. A fourth man arrested in the initial police raid was released.

All three suspects were acquitted by Swedish courts. The prosecutor, believing that there was sufficient evidence to convict, appealed the verdict of the district court to the Court of Appeal for Western Sweden.

The Appeals court found that a number of factual findings, including the fact that the three accused were carrying knives at the time of their arrests, the fact that they responded to police interrogation about their activities in the days prior to the arrests with information that was inaccurate, and the fact that the men were searching for Vilks at the Röda Sten gallery in Gothenburg art exhibition on September 11th, 2011 when they were arrested. The court found that there was insufficient evidence to prove that the suspects intended to commit murder. All three were convicted of violateing Swedish weapons laws.

Aftermath
Swedish media, including Aftonbladet, harshly criticized the police and prosecutor for unduly suspicious and harsh persecution of the accused. In May of 2013, the office of the Chancellor of Justice awarded SEK 135,000 to one of the accused, Salar (Salm) Mahmood, for damages causes by the State in unjustly detaining an innocent man. In December 2013, Mahmmd's wife converted to Islam and the couple reportedly went on holiday to Turkey taking their two small children. The wife's sister suspected that they had joined the Islamic State in Syria.

Mahmood, who was born in Iraq and migrated to Sweden as a 10-year-old, had a been convicted of violent crimes, including stabbing a man to near the point of death in 2005. He told prosecutors in the Vilks trial that he "was arrested and got three years in prison before Islam, I was not a good person before Islam rescued me and guided me." According to a 2016 report in Aftonbladet, Mahmood is in Syrian fighting with ISIS.