By JOHN F. BURNS
c.2010 New York Times News Service
LONDON – A heavily bandaged 28-year-old Somali man was wheeled into a Danish court on a stretcher on Saturday and charged with attempting to kill a Danish artist whose 2005 cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad was one of a series that ignited riots across the Muslim world, as well as firebombing attacks on Danish and other Western diplomatic missions.
At one point during the attack on Friday, only a reinforced bathroom door protected the 75-year-old artist, Kurt Westergaard, who was shielding his 5-year-old granddaughter as the attacker, armed with an ax and a knife and shouting “Revenge!” and “Blood!” attempted to smash through the door, according to an account the artist gave to the Danish newspaper that employs him, Jyllands-Posten.
The artist and his granddaughter, who was on a sleepover at the house, were alone there when the attacker struck.
The suspect was wounded by police gunshots to the knee and hand when he resisted arrest after smashing a window and breaking into Westergaard’s home, according to a police statement.
At the court hearing in the artist’s hometown of Aarhus, the attacker was formally charged with two counts of attempted murder for trying to kill Westergaard and a police officer. In accordance with Danish law, the judge ruled that his name be withheld pending future court appearances, and ordered that he be held in custody for the next four weeks, two of them in isolation.
The suspect, a Danish resident, pleaded not guilty, but did not speak in the hearing, which was closed to the public.
One of the few details about the assailant given by the police was that he had been involved in an immigration hearing after an attempt to deport him and that he had been granted the right of residence in Denmark. But Jakob Scharf, head of the Danish intelligence service, known as PET, said in a statement on Friday night that the man had been under surveillance by the intelligence agency, and that the “attempted assassination” of Westergaard was “terror-related.”
The statement said that the agency had information that the Somali assailant “has close relations to the Somali terror organization al-Shabab and leaders of al-Qaida in east Africa”, that he was “part of a terror-related network with connection to Denmark” and that he was “also suspected of having been involved in terror-related activities during his stay in east Africa.”
But the assertion that the Shabab, a radical Islamist insurgency, was linked to the attack on the artist was denied by a spokesman for the group in Somalia, who said that while the attacker who struck in Aarhus was not a member of the group, Shabab supported what he did.
“He is not a member of our group,” the spokesman, Sheik Ali Mohamoud Raghe, said. “He was a man angered by the cartoons, and we welcome his act.”
Analysts in Somalia also expressed doubts that Shabab would have been more than a source of inspiration for the attacker, saying that Shabab’s usual method of attack is with suicide bombs, not knives and axes.
Bent Preben Nielsen, assistant police commissioner of East Jutland, said that while the suspect appeared to have acted alone on Friday, the police were investigating whether others were involved in planning the attack.
The nature of the attack, and its timing, on New Year’s Day, appeared certain to generate a new wave of anxiety about Islamic radicalism in the wake of the failed Christmas Day bombing by a young Nigerian man of an American airliner flying from Amsterdam to Detroit. The 23-year-old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, said by American officials to have been prepared for the bombing attempt by al-Qaida operatives in Yemen, is being held in a federal prison in Michigan pending trial on charges of attempting to murder the nearly 300 people aboard the aircraft.
The attack on Westergaard in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city, situated on the Baltic coast of the Jutland peninsula about 200 miles by road from Copenhagen, came as a deep shock to Danes. Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen called the attack “despicable.”
“This is not only an attack on Kurt Westergaard but also an attack on our open society and our democracy,” he said in a statement.
Until the attack, Danes had begun to hope that the violent passions aroused by the cartoons had subsided, at least to the point where Denmark would no longer be a special target for militant hatred and where the artists involved could resume living normal lives, albeit with residual surveillance protection by Denmark’s security agencies.
But the shock of the attack was balanced by relief that the system established by the country’s security agencies to protect Westergaard had worked. Official accounts said police arrived on the scene within three minutes of his having activated a panic button that was installed in his home amid the furor that followed the publication, originally in Jyllands-Posten and later by other publications in Denmark and around the world, of 12 satirical cartoons of the Muslim prophet. The cartoons enraged many Muslims, who considered them blasphemous, and were taken by militant Islamic groups as a fresh justification for violent attacks on the West.
Nielsen, the assistant police commissioner, said the man who tried to kill Westergaard had abandoned his attack and left the house just as two police cars arrived. He said the assailant attacked the first of the police cars with his ax, then, as the car pulled back, threw the ax at an officer advancing on him with a can of pepper spray.
When the ax narrowly missed the officer’s head, Nielsen said, the officer opened fire with his pistol, striking the assailant twice.
Immediately after the attack, Westergaard was taken by the police to a safe house in an undisclosed location, resuming the life in the shadows that he adopted for the first three years after the fury over the cartoons erupted, when, according to an interview he gave the Canadian newspaper The National Post in October, he had lived in “10 different safe houses and driven 10 different cars.”
Much of the opprobrium among Muslims and others who considered the cartoons offensive focused on the cartoon contributed by Westergaard, which showed the prophet, looking angry and somewhat menacing, with heavy, dark eyebrows and whiskers, wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb, with a lit fuse burning. The cartoons were published by Jyllands-Posten to accompany an editorial criticizing what it described as self-censorship in the Danish media on issues involving Muslims and Islamic militancy. There are about 250,000 Muslims living in Denmark, which has a population of 5.4 million.
But for all the dismay that the attack caused among his fellow Danes, it appeared unlikely to have greatly surprised Westergaard.
“This will go on for the rest of my lifetime, I’m sure,” he told The New York Times in a 2008 interview. “I will never get out of this.
“But I feel more anger than fear. I’m angry because my life is threatened, and I know I’ve done nothing wrong, just done my job.”
The attack followed years of threats from Islamic militant groups and at least three other abortive plots by Islamic militants to kill the artist, who at one point had a $1 million ransom posted on his head on a militant Web site.
In February 2008, three men, two from Tunisia and a Dane of Moroccan descent, were arrested in Denmark when the police uncovered what they described as “a terror-related assassination plot” against the artist. The police said at the time that they had foiled at least two other plots to kill him.
In October, the police in Chicago arrested two men, David C. Headley and Tahawwur Rana, and charged them with plotting to attack Westergaard’s newspaper and its employees.
But none of those plots came as close to succeeding as the attack on Friday in Viby, a mostly working class district of Aarhus.
Westergaard’s account of the attack, as given on the Jyllands-Posten Web site, reflected the horror he felt as the attacker swung his ax against the door into an attempt to break into the bathroom, which police had converted in a “safe room” at government expense before the artist resumed living there about a year ago.
“My grandchild did fine”, the artist was quoted as saying. “It was scary. It was close. Really close. But we did it.”