Muslim anger unabated over prophet cartoons
(AFP)
Updated: 2006-02-03 09:12

The furore in the Muslim world over the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Western media raged on as a battle line was drawn between freedom of the press and respect for Islam.

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen tried to bridge the differences in an interview broadcast Thursday on Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television. The cartoons first appeared in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten last September and touched off protests and a boycott of Danish products in most Arab nations.

A Syrian Muslim man holds up a poster featuring logos of Danish products during a protest in front of the embassy of Denmark in Damascus. Islamic militants threatened to kill European nationals as the crisis over cartoons of Mohammed intensified, while in Europe more media rallied in support of freedom of expression and refused to give way to Muslim anger. [AFP]

"I would like to make it clear that I am deeply distressed that many Muslims have seen the drawings in the Danish newspaper as a defamation of the Prophet Mohammed," Rasmussen said in the interview that was taped on Wednesday.

"I know that this was not the intention of the newspaper, (which) has apologized for that and I do hope that we can find a solution on that basis."

Newspapers and magazines in several European countries including Norway and France also have published, in the name of freedom of expression, the sketches that show the Prophet Mohammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban and as a sword-wielding nomad flanked by two women shrouded in black.

To Muslims the cartoons are blasphemous as Islam prohibits any images of the prophet.

The firestorm of reaction spread throughout the Middle East. In the Palestinian territories two masked gunmen briefly seized a German national from a hotel in the West Bank town of Nablus "thinking he was French or Danish, and handed him over to police after realising their mistake," said a source from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

"The two men were acting to protest over the cartoons," he said.

Earlier, two armed groups threatened to target Danes, French and Norwegians in the Palestinian territories.

Palestinian gunmen besieged the European Union headquarters in the Gaza Strip and scrawled "Closed Until Apology is Made to the Muslims" on the gate to the building, which had not opened for business for fear of violence.