5 held as raids foil terror attack
Source: Agencies |
December 30, 2010, Thursday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
FIVE men planning to shoot as many people as possible in a building housing the newsroom of a paper that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad were arrested yesterday in an operation that halted an imminent attack, intelligence officials said.
Denmark's intelligence service said it arrested four men in two raids in suburbs of the capital Copenhagen and seized an automatic weapon, a silencer and ammunition. Swedish police said they arrested a 37-year-old Swedish citizen of Tunisian origin living in Stockholm.
"An imminent terror attack has been foiled," said Jakob Scharf, head of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, or PET. He described some the suspects as "militant Islamists with relations to international terror networks" and said more arrests were possible.
PET said it seized a 44-year-old Tunisian, a 29-year-old Lebanese-born man and a 30-year-old who were living in Sweden and had entered Denmark in the past two days. The fourth person detained was a 26-year-old Iraqi asylum-seeker living in Copenhagen.
The Danish intelligence service said the group had been planning to enter the building where the Jyllands-Posten daily has its Copenhagen newsdesk and had wanted "to kill as many of the people present as possible." The four men face preliminary charges of attempting to carry out an act of terrorism.
Zubair Butt Hussain, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Denmark, called the plan "extremely worrying." The organization "absolutely condemns any act of terrorism regardless of the motives and motivations that may lie behind," he said.
There have been at least four plots to attack Jyllands-Posten or Kurt Westergaard, the artist who drew the most contentious of the 12 cartoons published by the daily in 2005.
Denmark's intelligence service said it arrested four men in two raids in suburbs of the capital Copenhagen and seized an automatic weapon, a silencer and ammunition. Swedish police said they arrested a 37-year-old Swedish citizen of Tunisian origin living in Stockholm.
"An imminent terror attack has been foiled," said Jakob Scharf, head of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, or PET. He described some the suspects as "militant Islamists with relations to international terror networks" and said more arrests were possible.
PET said it seized a 44-year-old Tunisian, a 29-year-old Lebanese-born man and a 30-year-old who were living in Sweden and had entered Denmark in the past two days. The fourth person detained was a 26-year-old Iraqi asylum-seeker living in Copenhagen.
The Danish intelligence service said the group had been planning to enter the building where the Jyllands-Posten daily has its Copenhagen newsdesk and had wanted "to kill as many of the people present as possible." The four men face preliminary charges of attempting to carry out an act of terrorism.
Zubair Butt Hussain, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Denmark, called the plan "extremely worrying." The organization "absolutely condemns any act of terrorism regardless of the motives and motivations that may lie behind," he said.
There have been at least four plots to attack Jyllands-Posten or Kurt Westergaard, the artist who drew the most contentious of the 12 cartoons published by the daily in 2005.
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