A Swedish court has convicted the head of a neo-Nazi movement of ‘incitement to racial hatred’ more than a year after he held a speech at a Stockholm rally.
The Nordic Resistance Movement, founded in 1997, is described as the most violent Nazi organisation in Sweden by Swedish anti-racism magazine Expo.
The Movement’s leader Simon Lindberg, held a speech which “spread and expressed contempt for groups based on their race, skin colour, national or ethnic origin by shouting ‘Sieg Heil’ while raising his right arm upwards”, the Stockholm district court said in its verdict.
Five people were arrested and two were injured in clashes between police and anti-fascists at the November 2016 rally, organised by the group.
The court said Lindberg had never been convicted before and that his crime merited punishment of one month in prison.
But because he had been speaking at a rally which had a permit the sentence was suspended and combined with an SEK 800 (~€81) fine instead.
A district court in Sweden’s second largest city of Gothenburg in July sentenced three neo-Nazi activists for up to eight and a half years in prison over bomb attacks against refugee shelters that left one person seriously injured.
