Copenhagen, December 30: Denmark’s intelligence service arrested four people suspected of planning an “imminent” terror attack against a newspaper that printed the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) cartoons. Swedish police said they arrested a fifth suspect.
The Danish Security and Intelligence Service, known as PET, said three of the four men were residents of Sweden and had entered the country during the night of Tuesday to Wednesday. The fifth suspect was a 37-year-old Swedish citizen of Tunisian origin living in Stockholm. Jakob Scharf, the head of PET, said the arrests in Denmark were made after close cooperation with Swedish police.
“An imminent terror attack has been foiled,” Scharf said, describing some the suspects as “militant Islamists”. He said that more arrests could not be ruled out.
Scharf said they considered the attack had been thwarted and that “there was no need to raise the terror threat alert level” in Denmark.
PET 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 other three suspects living in Sweden were a 44-year-old Tunisian citizen, a 29-year-old Lebanese-born man and a 30-year-old whose origin was not immediately known. The final suspect was a 26-year-old Iraqi asylum-seeker living in Copenhagen, PET said.
The four men face preliminary charges of attempting to carry out an act of terrorism. They will face a custody hearing on Thursday.
-Agencies