Copenhagen:
Police in Sweden and Denmark on Wednesday arrested five men suspected of plotting an attack against the Danish newspaper that published cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in 2005, security officials in those countries said.
The officials gave no details on precisely how they believed the suspects were intending to attack the newspaper, which is housed in a building in Copenhagen. But Jakob Scharf, the head of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, known as PET, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying "an imminent terror attack has been foiled."
Four of the suspects were arrested in Denmark and a fifth in Sweden. Three of the men are Swedish citizens, according to a statement released by Swedish security police.
The statement referred to a "serious terror crime" that had been thwarted through the cooperation of Danish and Swedish police but gave few details. The Danish security police said that the men had entered the country from Sweden sometime on Tuesday night.
Four of the men lived in Sweden but the police said they did not appear to have connections to a botched Dec. 11 suicide bombing near a crowded commercial area of downtown Stockholm. The bomber in that case was a 28-year-old Swedish citizen of Iraqi origin.
The Danish security service provided some details about the four men arrested in Denmark. Three were Swedish residents: a 44-year-old Tunisian citizen, a 29-year-old of Lebanese origin and a 30-year-old whose origin was not immediately clear. The fourth was a 26-year-old asylum seeker from Iraq who lived in Copenhagen.
"The arrests today have not had an impact on the threat level in Sweden," said Petter Liljeblad, a spokesman for the Swedish police.
In September 2005, the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten published satirical caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. The images, seen as blasphemous by many Muslims and a deliberate provocation by a conservative newspaper, provoked outrage and some violent rioting in Muslim countries.
The Danish newspaper and those connected with the publication of the Muhammed cartoons, which were reproduced by other European newspapers, have been regular targets of violence. In January, a Somalia man armed with an ax and a knife tried to enter the home of the cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, in Aarhus, Denmark. That foiled attack followed the arrest in 2009 of two Chicago men in a plot to attack employees of the newspaper.