Seven Muslims held in Ireland over Swedish cartoonist plot (Roundup)

Mar 9, 2010, 16:34 GMT

Dublin - Police in Ireland Tuesday arrested seven Muslims in connection with an alleged murder plot against a Swedish cartoonist who depicted the Prophet Mohammed with the body of a dog.

Police said the four men and three women, aged between 20 and 40, were seized in raids in Waterford in the south-east of Ireland and near the city of Cork as part of an investigation 'into a conspiracy to murder an individual in another jurisdiction.'

Last September, an Iraqi-based group said to be linked to al-Qaeda placed a bounty of 100,000 dollars on the head of Lars Vilks after his caricature was published in a local newspaper.

The cartoonist, who lives in an isolated region near Helsingborg in southern Sweden, was put under police protection after receiving threatening anonymous phone calls.

He said at the time that he established the calls originated from Somalia.

Irish police said the arrests were made after investigations involving European security agencies and the CIA and FBI in the US.

Reports from Ireland said those held are originally from Morocco and Yemen, but were all understood to have refugee status allowing them to live legally in Ireland.

Some had converted to the Muslim faith and were holding Irish citizenship. Under the provisions of the Criminal Justice Act, they could be held for up to a week.

The controversial hand-drawn sketches published by Vilks outraged Muslims in some countries after they appeared in the publication Nerikes Allehanda in Orebro, a city in southern central Sweden in August, 2007.

Even Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt was drawn into efforts to calm tensions when he held a debate with ambassadors from 22 Islamic countries.

However, the controversy surrounding Vilks has been far less than that which has engulfed Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist whose caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed sparked violent protests around the world in 2006.

Westergaard's controversial cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban was one of 12 images published in September 2005 by the Jyllands-Posten newspaper.

Vilks said in January that a man who spoke poor Swedish asked him on the phone if he was aware of what had happened to Westergaard in neighbouring Denmark. Westergaard had just survived an attack on him at his home by a Somali-born man armed with an axe and a knife.

'I said, of course I knew about it,' Vilks told the online edition of the Helsingborgs Dagblad newspaper.

The man said several times 'they were coming' before the call ended, Vilks reported.