Police were called to a fire at a private property in Lund, owned by a local politician, shortly after 2am on Tuesday morning. Police later said that several people in the same row of terraced homes had been evacuated but no one had been injured in the fire.

The Jewish Community of Malmö chairman Fredrik Sieradzki told The Local that the property owner had previously received anti-Semitic threats.

“This person has been threatened and harassed earlier this year, and been given messages that were clearly anti-Semitic. We had already been helping her with these threats, and our suspicion is very strong that it's an anti-Semitic attack. Police also see this as an arson,” Sieradzki said. 

The organization called the fire “an attack on Swedish democracy” and said that it had a “strong suspicion” that there was an anti-Semitic motive in a statement released on Wednesday.

It is the second apparent arson attack against a Jewish public figure living in Lund this year.

“Earlier this year another person with a Jewish background, who has been active in different Jewish venues, had a similar thing happen to him,” said Sieradzki. In that case, he said the victim had not received written threats but experienced other forms of harassment, including having feces smeared on his property and a flamethrower attack on his home. 

The chairman said that the organization had no further information about the possible identity of the suspect. The Local has contacted police in Lund for further comment but had not received a response at the time of publication.

Sweden and the Skåne region has struggled to combat anti-Semitism for a number of years. In 2010 the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which represents Jewish interests abroad, issued a travel warning for Malmö urging “extreme caution”, before saying in 2015 that “virtually nothing has changed” since.

In December last year, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven said the country had an “anti-Semitism problem” after a weekend which saw anti-Semitic chants and violence in multiple locations across Sweden.

LONG READ: Breaking down Sweden's anti-Semitism problem