Feds: Chicago men planned to attack Danish paper

Posted on 28. Oct, 2009 by Shera Crossan in Arts/Entertainment, Events, Foreign and Domestic Intelligence, Free Speech, Immigration, Opinion, Race, Religion, Shera Crossan, Top Stories

CHICAGO – Two Chicago men who were schoolmates in Pakistan plotted terrorist attacks against a Danish newspaper that triggered widespread protests by printing cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, federal prosecutors said Tuesday in announcing charges against the men.

David Coleman Headley, 49, traveled to Denmark in January and July to conduct surveillance on possible targets, including the Copenhagen and Aarhus offices of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, prosecutors said in criminal complaints filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago. Tahawwur Hussain Rana, 48, helped arrange Headley‘s travel, prosecutors said.

Danish authorities said there could be more arrests.
The publication led to outrage among the Muslim immigrants living in Denmark. 5,000 of them took to the streets to protest. Muslim organisations have demanded an apology, but Juste rejects this idea: “We live in a democracy. That’s why we can use all the journalistic methods we want to. Satire is accepted in this country, and you can make caricatures,” he said. The Danish imam Raed Hlayhel reacted with the statement: “This type of democracy is worthless for Muslims. Muslims will never accept this kind of humiliation. The article has insulted every Muslim in the world.”

Flemming Rose, the cultural editor at the newspaper, denied that the purpose had been to provoke Muslims. It was simply a reaction to the rising number of situations where artists and writers censored themselves out of fear of radical Islamists, he said. “Religious feelings cannot demand special treatment in a secular society,” he added. “In a democracy one must from time to time accept criticism or becoming a laughingstock.”More

According to U.S. prosecutors, Headley visited the newspaper’s Copenhagen offices in January and told employees he represented Rana’s business, First World Immigration Services, and that the business was considering opening offices in Denmark and might buy advertising.

Prosecutors said Headley told FBI agents after his Oct. 3 arrest at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport that the initial plan called for attacks on the newspaper’s offices, but that he later proposed just killing the paper’s former cultural editor and the cartoonist behind the drawings, which triggered outrage throughout the Muslim world. He described his plans to contacts in Pakistan as “the Mickey Mouse project,” according to the FBI.

The newspaper published twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in 2005. One cartoon showed Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban. Any depiction of the prophet, even a favorable one, is forbidden by Islamic law as likely to lead to idolatry.More