Cartoonist rebuke for Danish security

Lars Vilks, the Swedish cartoonist understood to have been a primary target of one of last weekend’s deadly Copenhagen shootings, has rounded on Danish police, whom he claimed had vastly underestimated the terror threat posed to the city.

“The attacker had good weapons, he had better weapons than the police,” said Vilks, 68, who has been in hiding since the shootings at the weekend.

“There was an escalation since the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the Danes had not caught onto that.”

Vilks has faced dozens of death threats from radical Islamists since his cartoon portraying the Prophet Mohammed as a dog was published in a Swedish newspaper eight years ago.

He has claimed that his cartoon was meant to challenge political correctness in the art world. He conceded that, after the sketch sparked an uproar in the Islamic world, he had been naive to think its effect would be limited.

Saturday’s attack on the Copenhagen meeting he attended, which was meant to mark the 25th anniversary of an Iranian fatwa against British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie, killed one person. Vilks, 68, was brought to the safety of a cold storage room.

The assaults came weeks after the Paris attacks last month by Islamist gunmen on the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly and a kosher supermarket that left 17 people dead.

“They did not step up security on Saturday,” said Vilks. “It was the same as we had previously... They must consider whether they need to be better armed.”

Since his cartoon was published, Vilks has had a $100,000 bounty put on his , received death threats, and had a firebomb thrown at his house, been given a round-the-clock police guard, and seen several would-be killers, including one calling herself Jihad Jane, sent to prison.

Vilks said that, despite the threats, he intended to keep speaking out.

“I have no plans to give up,” he said. “But I don’t know what security decisions will be made — it could be deemed inappropriate to speak publicly. It would be tragic if that was the case.

“But there can’t be a military operation every time I’m going to lecture.”

Meanwhile, Danish police said they found no explosives in a suspect package left outside a Copenhagen cafe yesterday, the scene of the fatal shooting three days earlier.

Copenhagen has been on high alert since Saturday.

Police shot and killed the suspected gunman on Sunday and arrested two people on Monday accused of helping him.

Police have declined to identify the shooter, but media outlets have named him as Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, a son of Palestinian immigrants known to the police due to weapons violations, an assault conviction and membership of a gang.

Prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt called the events a terrorist attack.