Following an alarm being raised on Tuesday 3rd of January about a suspicious package being present at Edinburgh Central Mosque, a controlled explosion has been carried out to remove the threat. The mosque, as well as the streets surrounding it, were closed to the public, as police and emergency services secured the area before dealing with the suspicious package.
While the item was found to have been innocent, it highlights the threats mosques across the UK have become used to dealing with. Rising islamophobia over the last decade has led to bomb removal incidents rising in recent years, as well as the prevalence of attacks on mosques causing tragedies.
In 2019, Steven Bishop was jailed for four years after stockpiling explosives with the intention of creating a bomb to attack a south London Mosque. While ultimately being unsuccessful and arrested, his sentencing was one of the lowest possible for such an offence, raising fears that further plans to attack mosques in the UK would not be deterred by his sentencing, and instead, use his failures to avoid detection.
Statistics from the Scottish government showed that approximately a quarter of reported religious hate crime was perpetrated against Muslims, despite the religious group only making up 1.4 percent of Scotland’s population. Religious hate crimes have also seen little signs of decline, in contrast to racial hate crime numbers, which have fallen by a third since their peak in 2010. The incident in Edinburgh on Tuesday shows that fears of religiously motivated attacks are still worryingly high.
Luckily, there were no casualties at Edinburgh Central Mosque, and the suspicious item turned out to be innocent in nature. However, the incident stands as a stark reminder in 2023 that attacks on mosques and hate crimes against Muslims are persistent problems which the Scottish Government has been unable to effectively combat.