Terror plot to kill paper staff foiled, says agency

SCANDINAVIAN intelligence chiefs said they had foiled a plot yesterday to kill staff at a Danish newspaper which published caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed and had arrested five suspects.

The head of Denmark’s PET intelligence service said his officers had detained four men while a spokes- woman for Swedish intelligence agency Saepo said a fifth man had been arrested in Stockholm in connection with the same plot against the Copenhagen-based Jyllands-Posten daily newspaper.

Several of the suspects could be described “as militant Islamists with connections to international terror networks,” PET chief Jakob Scharf said in a statement.

“These arrests have successfully stopped an imminent terror attack, where several of the suspects... were going to force their way into the (building which houses the Jyllands-Posten) in Copenhagen and kill as many people as possible,” he said.

PET said the four men arrested in Denmark were a 44-year-old Tunisian, a 29-year-old Swede born in Lebanon, a 30-year-old Swede and a 26-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker. The suspect arrested in Stockholm was a 37-year-old Swede of Tunisian background, PET added.

The first three men have lived in Sweden and travelled to Denmark over- night, arriving yesterday.

According to Jyllands- Posten’s online edition, the group had travelled to Denmark in a car rented in the Stockholm suburb of Kista.

“The arrests underscore the serious terror threat against Denmark and especially against institutions and people connected to the cartoon case,” Scharf said.

Jyllands-Posten published a dozen cartoons in 2005 of the Prophet Mohammed that triggered violent and sometimes deadly protests around the world.

In January, a Somali man broke into the home of one of the cartoonists and allegedly threatened to kill him with an axe and a knife.

In September, a suspect detained in Norway confessed that he was planning an attack against Jyllands-Posten. In another case the same month, a Chechnya-born man was arrested in Copenhagen for preparing to send a letter bomb to the paper.

An Islamist militant who blew himself up in downtown Stockholm on December 11 sent an email ahead of his suicide mission saying he was avenging Swedes for their “support of the pig Lars Vilks”, referring to a Swedish cartoonist who drew an image of the Prophet Mohammed with the body of a dog.

Saepo spokeswoman Katarina Sevcik said that the group arrested yesterday “have up to now no known connection to the events of December 11”.

The PET said last month that it had “renewed indications that terrorist groups abroad are looking to send terrorists to Denmark to commit terrorist attacks”.