Muhammad cartoonist to face attacker in court

HE lives under round-the-clock protection and travels in an armoured SUV.

Bodyguards are posted in a shack outside his home, which is equipped with a panic room that saved him from an axe-wielding intruder.

With a few strokes of a pen, Kurt Westergaard’s life changed forever: his drawing of the Prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban has made him a hunted man.

This week, the 75-year-old cartoonist faces the man police say tried to kill him on New Year’s Day, 2010, as the Somali’s terror trial gets under way.

His caricature was considered among the most offensive of the 12 cartoons of Muhammad published by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, triggering a firestorm of protests that rippled across the Islamic world four months later.

Authorities feared Westergaard was at risk of an attack similar to the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was killed by a fanatic angered by the movie the Dutchman made that criticised Islam.

The cartoonist was placed under police protection in February 2008, after police said two Tunisian men plotted to kill him. They were deported without charges.

When the attack finally came, Westergaard reacted out of instinct, following instructions drilled into him by Danish police.

He didn’t even see the intruder. Upon hearing the glass door facing the garden shatter, he rushed inside the bathroom — reinforced with a metal-plated door to serve as a panic room — and alerted police.

The door held. The attacker left the house, and was confronted by police, who pepper-sprayed him, then shot him in the knee as he hurled the axe at an officer.

The defendant, who cannot be named under a court order, denies the charges, his lawyer Niels Christian Straus said.

He declined to say what his client was doing at the house, saying he’ll explain it as the trial begins at the city court in Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city.