Denmark has evacuated staff from its embassies in Algeria and Afghanistan because of terror threats following the reprint in Danish newspapers of a caricature depicting the Prophet Mohammed, officials said on Wednesday.
Embassy employees in the Algiers and Kabul would continue to work out of “secret locations” in those cities, and would be reachable by phone and e-mail, Foreign Ministry spokesman Erik Laursen said.
The threat “is so concrete that we had to take this decision,” Laursen said.
“The decision is based on intelligence,” he added, declining to elaborate.
The Netherlands took similar precautions, announcing on Wednesday that it had closed its embassy’s offices in Kabul two days earlier after reassessing the security situation in the Afghan capital.
Last week, Dutch Embassy personnel in Pakistan shifted to a luxury hotel in Islamabad because of heightened security concerns following the release of a film critical of the Koran by Dutch parliament member Geert Wilders.
The Netherlands has stationed 1,600 combat troops with the NATO-led security force in southern Afghanistan.
In Copenhagen, Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller suggested Danish embassies in other locations also could be forced to relocate their staff following a warning last month by al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
“There has been a general threat from al-Qaeda which means that their cells or people who sympathize with them around the world will try to see where they can fulfill al-Qaeda’s desires,” Moeller said in a TV interview. “Therefore I can certainly not say that they are the last two embassies [to be evacuated].”
In an audio recording posted on a militant Web site on March 19, bin Laden warned of a “severe” reaction against Europe over the republishing of the cartoon.
Danish intelligence officials have warned of an “aggravated” terror threat against Denmark because of the Feb. 13 reprinting of the drawing, which showed Mohammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban. It was one of the 12 Danish prophet cartoons that sparked riots in the Muslim world in 2006.
More than a dozen newspapers reprinted the cartoon, saying they wanted to support free speech after police revealed a plot to kill the creator of the caricature.
Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet, even favorable, for fear it could lead to idolatry.
The Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that employees had been moved from the Danish embassies in Algiers and Kabul “because of terror threats.”
Laursen said the employees in Algiers were relocated “some days ago,” while the staff in Kabul was moved on Wednesday.
“Right now, we are in places that we consider safe,” he said.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS