Six men [have been arrested, and] could face charges of inciting racial hatred after a video of them burning copies of the Koran on the anniversary of 9/ 11 was posted on YouTube. . . . charges carrying a maximum sentence of seven years in jail.
-- From "'We are English nationalists acting out of frustration': Defiance of yobs who set fire to the Koran" by David Williams, Paul Sims and Nick Fagge, UK Daily Mail 9/24/10
The video shows the men – wearing tea towels around their heads – setting the Muslim holy book ablaze after dousing it with fuel behind a pub in Gateshead, Tyneside.
At one point, a laughing man kicks what appears to be a Koran while his friends shout: ‘This is for the boys in Afghanistan. September 11, international burn a Koran day, for all the people of 9/11.
[Officials are considering] whether to bring charges under the 1986 Public Order Act – charges carrying a maximum sentence of seven years in jail.
The men said they should not have been arrested because ‘ Muslims are allowed to burn British flags’. One man, a 37-year- old unemployed father, said: ‘It wasn’t so much planned as more we were driven to do it.
‘Now there seems to be one law for them and one law for us. They can burn a Union Flag and the Stars and Stripes, but we get arrested for burning a few sheets of paper.’
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