Scandinavian intelligence agencies 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 four men were arrested while a spokeswoman for Swedish intelligence agency Saepo said a fifth man had been arrested in Sweden in connection with the same plot against the Copenhagen-based Jyllands-Posten daily.
They were planning an attack within the next few days, PET said in a statement.
In an email to Danish news agency Ritzau, Danish justice minister Lars Barfoed said the arrest of the suspects, who had a “militant Islamist background,” prevented what could have been the most serious attack to ever occur in Denmark.
Several of the suspects could be described “as militant Islamists with connections to international terror networks,” PET supremo Jakob Scharf said.
“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 in the PET statement.
The arrests took place in two suburbs of Copenhagen after a long investigation led in collaboration with Sweden’s Saepo, PET said.
The man arrested in Stockholm and two of the men arrested in Denmark are Swedish citizens.
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 first three were all living in Sweden and travelled to Denmark overnight yesterday. According to Jyllands-Posten’s online edition, the group had travelled in a car rented in the Stockholm suburb of Kista.
The suspect arrested in Stockholm was a 37-year-old Swede of Tunisian background.
Jyllands-Posten published a dozen cartoons in 2005 of the Prophet Mohammed that triggered violent and sometimes deadly protests around the world.
It has since been the target of many foiled attacks.