Denmark holds 'Muhammad cartoon plotters'

[Alan]

Denmark holds 'Muhammad cartoon plotters'
Police in the Herlev area of Copenhagen, 29/12 Police said they had been trailing the suspects for several months

Five suspected Islamist militants have been arrested for planning a gun attack at the Copenhagen offices of a Danish newspaper that printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005, police say.

The men intended to burst into the Jyllands-Posten office and kill as many people as possible, officials said.

Justice Minister Lars Barfoed said the "outrageous" plot was "the most serious attempt at terror so far in Denmark".

Four suspects were held in Denmark and the fifth was detained in Sweden.

Denmark's security agency Pet said the suspects included two Swedish residents with Tunisian backgrounds, one Lebanon-born Swede, and an Iraqi. The other was described only as Swedish.

Earlier this month, an Iraq-born Swedish Muslim blew himself up in Stockholm - apparently as he was preparing a suicide bombing.

Swedish police say the suspects held on Wednesday are not thought to be linked to the Stockholm bomber.

The publication of the cartoons in 2005, one of which depicted the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban, caused mass protests among Muslims across the world.

Muslims regard any visual representation of the Prophet as blasphemous.
Cartoons used 'efficiently'

The four held in Denmark were picked up in raids on flats in the Greve and Herlev suburbs of Copenhagen.

Police searches uncovered an automatic weapon, a silencer and live ammunition.

Jakob Scharf, head of Pet, said the four had been planning to enter the building housing the Jyllands-Posten and "kill as many of the people present as possible".

He said an "imminent terror attack" had been foiled, and that the suspects belonged to a "militant Islamist group and they have links to international terrorist networks".

"Obviously the cartoons have been used very efficiently by militant Islamist groups worldwide in targeting Denmark specifically and trying explain why the violent extremism is necessary," he said.

Sweden's security chief Anders Danielsson said they had known for months that the group was planning an attack, but the authorities had to wait until they had enough evidence for a prosecution.


Saudi Arabia recalled its Copenhagen ambassador, Danish firms were forced to scale back operations in some parts of the world, and gunmen raided an EU office in Gaza to demand an apology.

But many in the West have defended the media's right to publish the caricatures, and several European newspapers have republished some of the drawings.

Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist who drew the image of the turban bomb, has been honoured with awards by free-speech groups, but he now lives under police guard amid death threats from radical groups.

He was the subject of an attempted attack in January when a Somali man got into his home armed with a knife and an axe.

And police across Scandinavia have arrested several groups of people in raids linked to the cartoons.

Three men detained in Norway in July were suspected of planning attacks to avenge the cartoons.

In September, a Chechnya-born Belgian was arrested after a small explosion in Copenhagen, which police linked to the cartoons.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12089543

The Nordic countries paying the price for years of corporate Imperialism, oil wars, propping up Israel.....


Blowback is a bitch *cough*

 

[Kloofvreter]

Earlier this month, an Iraq-born Swedish Muslim blew himself up in Stockholm - apparently as he was preparing a suicide bombing.

 

[Alan]

One of the least surprising revelations to come out of the latest tranche of WikiLeaks cables is that the Syrian government, led by the supposedly secular Baathist Bashar al-Assad, helped arrange anti-Danish and anti-Norwegian riots in 2006 in response to the publication of the now-infamous “Mohammad cartoons.” According to a cable from the U.S. embassy in Damascus, the Assad government “allowed these demonstrations to occur and almost certainly helped to facilitate them at the beginning,” a point made contemporaneously by Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, the State Department (in a 2006 report on religious freedom in Syria), and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. But it’s also important to remember that as embassies burned, the Bush administration offered, in the words of Tim Cavanaugh, a "craven condemnation of an affair that is none of their business."

In related news, Danish police today announced the arrest of five people today on terrorism charges. According to Sky News, the men, most of whom had obtained residency in Sweden, were planning an "imminent" attack on the headquarters of Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that first published the cartoons.

The Danish Intelligence Agency PET said that three of the four men it arrested were Swedish residents who entered the country on Tuesday night.

It identified them as a 44-year-old Tunisian citizen, a 29-year-old Lebanese-born man and a 30-year-old Swedish resident whose origin was not immediately known.

The fourth suspect was a 26-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker living in Copenhagen, while the man arrested in Stockholm was described as a 37-year-old Swede of Tunisian background.

Jacob Scharf, head of PET, said the arrests had stopped "an imminent terror attack", adding that the suspects had allegedly planned to "kill as many people as possible".

Alas, nothing new here. The suicide bomber who blew himself up (prematurely) earlier this month in Stockholm was, according to police, on his way to a newspaper that published a Mohammad cartoon by Swedish artist Lars Vilks. In 2008, three men were arrested in connection with a plot to kill Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist responsible for the famous Mohammad-with-bomb-in-turban illustration. In January, a Somali man broke into Westergaard’s house wielding an axe; the 75 year-old artist escaped into a panic room and Danish police shot the attacker. In September, two men were arrested in Norway for planning a bomb attack against Jyllands-Posten. Also in September, an explosion in a Copenhagen hotel (which I blogged here) turned out to be a letter bomb being assembled by a one-legged Chechen boxer. The target? Would you believe that is was Jyllands-Posten?

Last week, Danish journalists Lars Hvidberg and Jacob Mchangama looked at the so-called cartoon crisis five years later.

All because of a cartoon