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Two women fined for ripping pages from Qur'an at football match

Two women fined for ripping pages from Qur'an at football match

Categories: Latest News

Tuesday May 06 2014

The Daily Mail reports on the trial of two women on charges of religiously aggravated public order offences after one of them tore pages from a Qur’an at a Middlesbrough match last December and passed them around for fellow fans to throw in the air ‘like confetti’.

The court heard how stewards at the football stadium where Middlesbrough were playing an away day fixture saw the two defendants, Julie Phillips, 50, and Gemma Parkin, 18, take the torn pages and pass them among fans. The crowd were seen throwing the torn pages in the air and overheard chanting remarks about ‘killing Muslims with a bayonet’.

Phillips, who took the Qur’an out of her bag and tore up the pages, denied doing it claiming she had been passed the torn sheets of paper and did not know what they were. But stewards who had alerted control to keep CCTV cameras focused on the group captured footage of Phillips being asked what she was tearing up and her respond to say, “the Koran”.

Phillips was fined £300, told to pay court costs of £400 and a victim surcharge of £30, while Parkin was fined £200, and ordered to pay a further £420 in court costs.

Mark Stephenson, 25, a fellow Middlesbrough fan was charged with a religiously aggravated public order offence after he mimicked setting fire to pages of the Qur’an passed to him. When approached by a steward who asked what the sheets of paper were, Stephenson replied, “It’s the Muslim Bible, we hate Muslims.”

He was fined at Birmingham Magistrates Court last month.

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