Prophet cartoon: two found guilty

An Oslo court yesterday found two men guilty of plotting “a terrorist act” for a planned attack on the Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
Norwegian national Mikael Davud, a member of China’s Uighur minority considered the mastermind behind the plot against the Jyllands-Posten daily, was sentenced to seven years behind bars, while Shawan Sadek Saeed Bujak, an Iraqi Kurd residing in Norway, received a three-and-a-half-year prison term.
The two men, who were arrested in July 2010, had connections with Al-Qaeda and had planned to use explosives against the Copenhagen offices of the Danish newspaper and to murder Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist behind the most controversial of the 12 drawings of the Muslim Prophet published in September 2005, according to the prosecution.
Westergaard’s drawing, which has earned him numerous death threats and an assassination attempt, showed Mohammed wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse.
The prosecution had demanded prison sentences of 11 and five years respectively.
A third man arrested at the same time as Davud and Bujak, Uzbek David Jakobsen, was acquitted of the most serious charges but was sentenced to four months behind bars for helping the two others to procure the materials needed to create the explosives.