A man who set fire to a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London was found guilty on Monday of committing a religiously aggravated public order offense, in a verdict critics said effectively reinstated an abolished blasphemy law.

Hamit Coskun, 50, was fined 240 pounds ($325) at London's Westminster Magistrates' Court after being convicted of being disorderly by shouting "F*** Islam" as he held aloft the burning book near the consulate in central London in February.

The lawyer for Coskun, whose father was Kurdish and his mother Armenian and who lived in central England, had argued that the prosecution amounted to an attempt to bring back a blasphemy law that was abolished in England in 2008.

Demonstrators burn the Swedish flag during a protest in Tehran against the i

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