OnIslam & News Agencies
Saturday, 23 August 2014 00:00
Representatives of the El-Hidaje mosque, where the shooting took place, were not immediately available for comment.
ST. GALLEN, Switzerland – A Muslimman has been shot dead inside an Albanian mosque in north easternSwitzerland city of St. Gallen while another man has been arrested, Swiss police said.
The incident has been reported after police was called into the mosque after a shooting.
Finding the victim’s body in the prayer room of the mosque, a spokesman for the cantonal police said that police arrested a man with a handgun.
Yet, he added that it was too early to say what motive there might be for the killing.
In a statement issued on Saturday, police announced that a 51-year-old Serbian man has confessed to the shooting.
The victim, also 51 years old, was a Swiss citizen with Albanian roots.
Representatives of the El-Hidaje mosque, where the shooting took place, were not immediately available for comment.
Yet, Fehim Dragusha, a former imam who served at the El-Hidaje mosque for three years, said the crime was not politically motivated.
"It's a personal conflict between two families, who were possibly settling a score," he told Reuters.
"It's nothing political at all."
Switzerland is home to an estimated 500,000 Muslims, out of a population of morethan 8 million, most of whom are immigrants from Albania and elsewhere in the Balkans.
In 2013, about 80,000 foreigners have immigrated to Switzerland, according to the People's Party (SVP).
There are 1.7 million immigrants in Switzerland, making up 22.3 percent of the country’s 7.9 million population.
The vote is not the first to raise controversy in Switzerland.
In 2009, the SVP has championed a ban on the building of mosque minarets in theEuropean country.
There are nearly 160 mosques and prayer rooms in Switzerland, mainly in disused factories and warehouses.
Only four of them have minarets, none of them used to raise the Azan, the call to prayer, which is banned.
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