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February 12, 2008

Denmark: Five Islamists Arrested For Cartoonist Murder Plot

News from Agence France-Presse, the Times, Copenhagen Post, Guardian, CNN, Washington Post, Press Association, Bloomberg, BBC, Europe News.

This morning, five persons, three of them Danish and two "foreign" were arrested in Aarhus (Århus), Denmark. The arrests took place at 3.30 am GMT and according to Danish intelligence agency PET, they were made to "prevent a murder linked to terrorism". Jakob Scharf, the head of PET claimed: "The clampdown occurred after a long period of surveillance." The suspected target of the murder plot was 73-year old artist Kurt Westergaard.

Mr Westergaard was one of the 12 artists whose pictures were reproduced in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten on September 30, 2005. These drawings were requested by the newspaper because Danish author Kare Blultgen had found that artists were too scared to illustrate his children's book on the life of Mohammed, founder of Islam.

Carsten Juste, the editor of Jyllands-Posten said: "There were very concrete murder plans against Kurt Westergaard." Full details of the arrests will be given later at a news conference by PET, said news agency Ritzau.

On the newspaper's website, a statement by Kurt Westergaard said: ""Of course I fear for my life after the Danish Security and Intelligence Service informed me of the concrete plans of certain people to kill me. However, I have turned fear into anger and indignation. It has made me angry that a perfectly normal everyday activity which I used to do by the thousand was abused to set off such madness. I could not possibly know for how long I have to live under police protection; I think, however, that the impact of the insane response to my cartoon will last for the rest of my life. It is sad indeed, but it has become a fact of my life."

He and his 66 year old wife Gitte have been under police protection for a year. They have been forced to change homes on numerous occasions on account of security.

In September 2006, Westergaard held a meeting at his temporary home with Kasem Said Ahmad, spokesperson for the Danish Islamic Society, one of the groups that had been trying to mount a lawsuit against the newspaper and its editors over the cartoons. The meeting was broadcast on television, but it turned sour when it became plain that Westergaard had no intention of apologizing.

On October 26, 2006 the class-action lawsuit on charges of "libel against Muslims" was thrown out by a court in Aarhus. Charges against the newspaper, its editor and culture editor Flemming Rose on hate speech and blasphemy were also thrown out.

Editor Carsten Juste said then: "Anything but a clear acquittal would have been a catastrophe for freedom of the press and the media's ability to fulfil its role in a democratic society. You can think what you want about the cartoons, but the newspaper's unassailable right to print them has been set by both the country's prosecutors and the court system."

Westergaard's drawing was notorious as it featured the turban of Mohammed as a bomb. The Palestinian-born cleric Abu Laban of the Waqfs mosque in Copenhagen sent a delegation to the Middle East to drum up anger against Denmark for allowing the cartoons to be reproduced. His assistant, Ahmed Akkiri, was part of the delegation. Instead of confining the images to those reproduced in the newspaper, three extra images were added - including a rough drawing of Mohammed with the word "pedophile" and a photocopy of a man in a pig mask. Akkiri and Laban claimed this represented Mohammed, but the man in the porcine mask was a winning contestant in a pig-squealing competition, and had nothing to do with either Denmark or Jyllands-Posten.

It is now the first anniversary of the riots that began at the start of February 2006 across the Muslim world. At least 50 people died, with the majority of these being killed in anti-Christian riots in Nigeria.

On January 30, Denmark's Royal Library announced that it would bid to house the 12 drawings in its collection. To view the cartoons, a visitor would be required to sign before being shown them. Jytte Kjaergaard, a spokeswoman for the library said: "It would be natural for us to have them at the Royal Library. We don't perceive them as works of art. We don't have any view on their substance or content. Our view is that they hold a place in our cultural heritage. The cartoons have become a part of Danish history."

What is of interest in what news is currently available, is that two of the five men arrested are said to be "foreign". On May 5, 2006, Italian news agency AKI reported that Abdullah Mahsud (Mehsud) had claimed that 12 jihadists had been sent to Denmark to kill the cartoonists. These had been dispatched a week after Osama bin Laden had issued a statement calling for the cartoonists to be tried by Al Qaeda.

Abdullah Mehsud, the one-legged leader of the Taliban in Waziristan, Pakistan who subsequently blew himself up on July 24, 2007, is the brother of Baitullah Mehsud, who officially headed the "Tehrik-e-Taliban" in northwestern Pakistan until sacked in January this year by Mullah Omar.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at February 12, 2008 8:38 AM

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