An Oslo court on Monday found two men guilty of plotting “a terrorist act” for a planned attack on the Danish newspaper that published blasphemous caricatures of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).
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 had in liaison with al Qaeda planned to use explosives against the offices of the Danish newspaper and to murder Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist behind the most controversial of the 12 drawings of the Prophet (PBUH) published in September 2005, according to the prosecution.
Westergaard’s drawing, which has earned him numerous death threats and an assassination attempt, showed was termed blasphemous by the entire Muslim world. The prosecution had demanded prison sentences of 11 and five years respectively. David Jakobsen, an Uzbek arrested at the same time as Davud and Bujak in July 2010, 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.
The three men had all pleaded not guilty to the charges. Davud, however, did confess to planning an attack, but said it was directed at Chinese interests in Norway and not at Jyllands-Posten.
The member of the oppressed Uighur minority in China said he had been acting out of purely personal motives and that he had manipulated the two others so they would help him get hold of chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide, which he needed to build a bomb. Bujak meanwhile admitted that he had spoken with Davud about the possibility of punishing Jyllands-Posten and Westergaard for the cartoons, but insisted the comments were vague and did not constitute a terrorist plot.
As for Jakobsen, who contacted police voluntarily in November 2009 and was the only one of the three to have been released from custody until the verdict, he categorically denied any intention to participate in the plot.