Man on trial for tearing-up and throwing Qur’an

The Leicester Mercury reports on the trial of a man on charges of religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress after he ripped pages from a copy of the Qur’an and threw it on the ground, telling a group of Muslims that “Your religion is a load of b******s.”

The incident happened in May this year at a stall held by the Islamic Information Centre (IIC) in Leicester city centre. Peter James Crawford, described as an atheist, is on trial at Leicester Crown Court, accused of “causing religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress, by demonstrating hostility based on membership of a particular religious group, Islam”. He denies the charges.

Kamran Qayyum of the IIC described what happened to the court:

“We give out literature to create an awareness of Islam and engage with the public.”

“He started tearing up pages from a book and they were going on the floor. He wasn’t saying anything. The pages covered a lot of ground, they were everywhere. “

After he noticed that the book being torn-up was a Qur’an, he knelt down to pick up the papers when Crawford “threw the Koran down, just missing me.”

Quyyum described that after Crawford was arrested, “He made a signal to us, shaping his hand in the form of a gun, saying ‘See you next Saturday.’

However, Crawford’s defence suggested that the hand gesture was the “pointing of a finger rather than a gun gesture”. Quyyum agreed that “apart from a hand gesture…the defendant did not threaten or provoke any violence.”

Crawford claimed that “he was expressing his disagreement with religion of any kind” and that “he would have done the same with a Bible as he did not understand either holy book and “hated” all religion.”

The trial continues.