Seven held in Ireland over Swedish cartoonist plot

The four men and three women were arrested in the southern Irish towns of Cork and Waterford following an international operation.

DUBLIN, March 9, 2010 (AFP) - Irish police arrested seven Muslims suspected of conspiracy to murder Tuesday over a reported plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist who drew the Prophet Mohammed with the body of a dog, they said.

The four men and three women were arrested in the southern Irish towns of Cork and Waterford following an international operation.

A police source confirmed press reports that they were Muslims arrested over an alleged plot to assassinate Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, who has a 100,000-dollar bounty on his head from an Al-Qaeda-linked group.

"The operation... is part of an investigation into a conspiracy to commit a serious offence (namely, conspiracy to murder an individual in another jurisdiction)," said a statement from Ireland's national police service.

It added that the operation involved law enforcement agencies in the United States and a number of European countries.

The seven range in age from mid 20s to late 40s, police said, while the RTE state broadcaster reported that they were originally from Morocco and Yemen, but were all legally in Ireland.

Swedish newspaper Nerikes Allehanda published a cartoon on August 18, 2007, depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a dog to illustrate an editorial on self-censorship and freedom of expression and religion.

The cartoon prompted protests by Muslims in the town of Oerebro, west of Stockholm, where the newspaper is based. Egypt, Iran and Pakistan made formal complaints and death threats were issued against Vilks.

An Al-Qaeda front organisation offered 150,000 dollars to anyone who slit Vilks' throat or 100,000 dollars for his murder by other means, while they also offered 50,000 dollars to kill newspaper editor-in-chief Ulf Johansson.

The uproar echoed that caused in Denmark by the publication by a newspaper in September 2005 of 12 drawings focused on Islam, including one with the Prophet Mohammed with a hat in the shape of a bomb.

Muslims worldwide, angered both by the association of their religion with terrorism and by the showing of images of Mohammed, which most consider blasphemous in themselves, took to the streets in protest.

In February 2008, Danish police said they had foiled a plot to murder the cartoonist of the bomb drawing, Kurt Westergaard, while another attempt on his life was allegedly made by a Somali man in January 2010.

Vilks has in the past dismissed the threats against him as "scare tactics" and, supported by the Swedish media, has insisted on the importance of publishing such material in defence of Sweden's freedom of expression.

He even announced in 2007 that he had begun working on a musical based on the drawing called "Dogs", involving Mohammed, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Al-Qaeda.

He compared it to musicals such as "Cats".