The police in Sweden and Denmark arrested five men on Wednesday suspected of plotting an “imminent” attack against at least one Danish newspaper that published cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in 2005, according to security officials in those countries.
At a news conference, Jakob Scharf, the head of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, said the suspects had planned a “Mumbai-style” attack, referring to the 2008 assault by multiple gunmen around the Indian city that left 163 people dead. Several European countries have been on high alert for months over the possibility of an attack in that style.
Searches related to the arrests had uncovered at least one machine gun with a silencer, live ammunition and “plastic strips that can be used as handcuffs,” according to the service, known as PET.
Mr. Scharf said that the suspects “must be considered militant Islamists with relations to international terror networks” and that they “would have attempted to force their way into the office of Jyllands-Posten or Politiken in Copenhagen and to kill as many as possible of the persons present.”
The two newspapers are based in the same building. Jyllands-Posten commissioned and initially published the cartoons, which were republished by Politiken and other European newspapers in solidarity amid the ensuing uproar.
Four of the suspects were arrested in the suburbs of Copenhagen and a fifth in Stockholm. Three are Swedish citizens, according to a statement released by Swedish security police. The Danish police did not rule out further arrests.
The statement referred to a “serious terror crime” that had been thwarted through the cooperation of Danish and Swedish police but gave few details. The Danish security police said that four of the men had entered the country from Sweden sometime Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning and were planning to attack within days.
They lived in Sweden but the police said they did not appear to have connections to a botched Dec. 11 suicide bombing near a crowded commercial area of downtown Stockholm. The bomber in that case was a 28-year-old Swedish citizen of Iraqi origin.
The Danish police provided some details about the four men arrested in Denmark. Three were Swedish residents: a 44-year-old Tunisian citizen, a 29-year-old of Lebanese origin and a 30-year-old whose origin was not immediately clear. The fourth was a 26-year-old asylum seeker from Iraq who lived in Copenhagen.
The Swedish police arrested a 37-year-old Swedish national of Tunisian origin in connection with the plot. “The arrests today have not had an impact on the threat level in Sweden,” said Petter Liljeblad, a spokesman for the Swedish police.
The images initially published in 2005 by Jyllands-Posten were seen as blasphemous by many Muslims and a deliberate provocation by a conservative newspaper. They provoked outrage and some violent rioting in Muslim countries, and have prompted repeated attempts at violence. In January, a Somalia man armed with an ax and a knife tried to enter the home of one cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, in Aarhus, Denmark.
That foiled attack followed the arrest in 2009 of two Chicago men in a plot to attack employees of the newspaper.
The building that houses both newspapers was already under high security before the arrests, said Lars Munch, the director of the newspaper group that publishes Jyllands-Posten, on the newspaper’s Web site. He called the plot “appalling” and said the newspaper was cooperating with Danish police in their investigation.
Christina Anderson contributed reporting from Stockholm for ny times.
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