A man living in Sweden was found guilty of physically abusing his wife and children but blamed his actions on being hungry due to Ramadan fasting.
The unidentified man, who lives in the south-west Swedish province of Dalsland, was sentenced to six months in prison after being convicted of five separate counts of assault, Swedish radio broadcaster Sveriges Radio reports.
The man denied culpability, claiming that intense hunger, due to fasting during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, had made it so that he could not control his own actions.
He was accused of multiple assaults which included shoving paper into the mouth of his two-year-old daughter and beating her on the hands and feet.
The defence of “Ramadan rage” was also used by another Muslim man in France as part of a case where he was accused of shaking his five-month-old daughter to death last year.
The 42-year-old man was said to have been angered by the infant crying and threw her on a hotel bed twice, with the child bouncing off the bed the second time and landing head-first into the floor. The child was later taken to a hospital with a skull fracture and died.
Earlier this year, French business owners in the city of Montpellier went as far as demanding the government provide extra security to their businesses ahead of Ramadan, arguing that they had seen an increase in violence during the holy month for the last four years.
“Ramadan rage” has not been limited to Europe. Within the first three weeks of Ramadan this year, 20 countries saw over 100 jihadist attacks with a death toll of 531 people and another 556 maimed.
Islamic State and the Afghanistan-based Taliban accounted for around 30 per cent of the total number of deaths during the three-week period.