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ISRAEL

Swedish tabloid cleared over Israel organ claims

A Swedish tabloid newspaper has been cleared of racism charges by the country's senior legal official over a story alleging that Israeli soldiers stole and sold body parts of dead Palestinians.

The Swedish Chancellor of Justice, Göran Lambertz, was asked to probe whether the report in the Aftonbladet tabloid last month amounted to inciting racial hatred and violated freedom of expression laws.

The TT news agency said the Chancellor of Justice had decided not to open a preliminary investigation into the case.

The Chancellor of Justice, who was unavailable for comment on Saturday, is a government-appointed official who acts as an independent judicial watchdog and is the only prosecutor in Sweden who can take legal action in cases concerning freedom of speech.

Aftonbladet alleged in a story in August that Israeli soldiers had been involved in the illegal harvesting and trafficking of human organs.

The claims sparked outrage in Israel and prompted senior figures in the Israeli government to demand that Sweden condemn the report.

But Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt rebuffed the calls, stressing a free press is an integral part of democracy.

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ISRAEL

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street

A former Israeli soldier was attacked in the German capital Berlin, police said Saturday, with one or several unknown assailants spraying him with an irritant and throwing him to the ground.

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street
Israeli soldiers on operation near the Gaza Strip. Photo: dpa | Ilia Yefimovich

The 29-year-old was wearing a top with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) logo when the attackers started harassing him on Friday about his religion, the police added, calling it “an anti-Semitic attack”.

Officers are seeking the assailants, who fled immediately after the attack, on suspicion of a politically-motivated crime.

Saturday is the second anniversary of an attack by a far-right gunman on a synagogue in the eastern German city of Halle, who killed two in a rampage when he failed to break into the house of worship.

It was one of a string of incidents that led authorities to declare the far right and neo-Nazis Germany’s top security threat.

Also this week, a musician claimed he was turned away from a hotel in eastern city Leipzig for wearing a Star-of-David pendant.

While the allegations prompted a fierce response from a Jewish community unsettled by increasing anti-Semitic crimes, several investigations have been mounted into contradictory accounts of the incident.

In 2019, police recorded 2,032 anti-Semitic crimes, an increase of 13 percent year-on-year.

“The threat is complex and comes from different directions” from jihadists to the far right, the federal government’s commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism Felix Klein said recently.

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