By IRNA,
London : A senior member of the extreme ring-wing British Nationalist Party (BNP) was appearing in court in Swansea, south Wales, Monday after police were passed a video appearing to show him burning a copy of the Holy Quran.
Sion Owens, aged 41, has been charged with a public order offence, while one of his colleagues, Joanne Shannon, who is also a BNP candidate in next month’s elections to the Welsh Assembly, was released on bail pending further inquiries after being arrested in connection with the sacrilege.
The arrests took place on Friday after the Observer newspaper reported that it had handed over a leaked video clip of the incident immediately to the police.
South Wales Police said that the pair were arrested and taken into custody within hours and Owen was charged under the Public Order Act on Saturday night.
‘We always adopt an extremely robust approach to allegations of this sort and find this sort of intolerance unacceptable in our society,’ said Superintendent Phil Davies, who is in charge of the investigation.
The sacrilege, which comes after, the burning of a Qu’ran by US pastor Terry Jones provoked international protests that led to deaths in Afghanistan last week, was also denounced by the British government.
‘The government absolutely condemns the burning of the Qur’an. It is fundamentally offensive to the values of our pluralist and tolerant society,” a statement from the Home Office said.
‘We equally condemn any attempts to create divisions between communities and are committed to ensuring that everyone has the freedom to live their lives free from fear of targeted hostility or harassment on the grounds of a particular characteristic, such as religion,’ the statement added.
The BNP, a splinter group formed from the far right National Front, has become renowned in recent years for using loopholes to Britain’s race relations law to demonise Muslims.
Its chairman, Nick Griffin, who was elected as a member of the European Parliament for North West England in 2009, was given a nine-month suspended sentence after being convicted of “publishing or distributing racially inflammatory written material” in 1998.
But in 2008, Griffin was cleared of racial incitement charges over remarks he made in an undercover BBC documentary, when claiming that his comments describing Islam as a ‘vicious, wicked faith’ were attacking not a race, but a religion.
Apart from having two MEPs elected by proportionate representation, the BNP has one seat on the London assembly and a few small pocket of local council seats, but no member of the British parliament.
The extreme right-wing part has announced that it is fielding a record number of candidates for the Welsh assembly elections, but anti-fascist groups maintain it is a fading political force.