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A British National Party (BNP) member and candidate for the forthcoming Welsh Assembly elections Sion Owens has been arrested for burning a copy of the Quran in his garden.
The footage clearly identifies Owens, who is wearing a “Whitelaw No Surrender” T-shirt in the video and starts with the Quran lying in a Quality Street chocolate tin before Owens douses the holy book in flammable liquid and then sets fire to it. The camera zooms in as the Quran burns.
A leaked video clip of the act was sent to the South Wales police immediately and has provoked fierce criticism from the government, The Guardian reports.
A statement from the Home Office said: “The government absolutely condemns the burning of the Quran. It is fundamentally offensive to the values of our pluralist and tolerant society.”
“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,” it said.
South Wales police Superintendent Phil Davies, who led the investigation, said: “We always adopt an extremely robust approach to allegations of this sort and find this sort of intolerance unacceptable in our society.”
Owens had been arrested within a few hours after the police received the video. A second person, believed to have filmed the Quran burning, has also been arrested.
The footage comes at a time of heightened tensions as protests against the recent Quran burning by the US pastor Terry Jones in his Florida church continue in Afghanistan
Last week, the BNP had officially announced that Owens was its number three candidate for the South Wales West constituency of the Welsh assembly.
THAINDIAN
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