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| December 3, 2005 | Saturday | Shawwal 30, 1426 |
Denmark issues travel advisory over threat
ISLAMABAD, Dec 2: Denmark said on Friday it had issued a warning to travellers to Pakistan after fundamentalists reportedly offered a reward for the deaths of cartoonists who drew blasphemous cartoons in a Danish newspaper.
Copenhagen altered its travel advisory for Pakistan after an official from Jamaat-i-Islami religious party allegedly offered the 500,000-rupee bounty, said Denmark’s ambassador to Islamabad, Bent Wigotski.
“We changed our travel advisory on Nov 17. It mentions the fact that cartoons were printed by a Danish newspaper in September and many Muslims consider them blasphemous and against Islam,” Wigotski told AFP.
“We mentioned that the cartoons have been mentioned in Pakistani papers and they have generated death threats against the cartoonists,” the envoy added.
The 12 drawings by two cartoonists appeared in Denmark’s largest circulation daily Jyllands-Posten on Sept 30 and caused an uproar in the Muslim community in Denmark and abroad.
The Danish ambassador said the change in the travel advisory was based on a report published in a Pakistani Urdu newspaper on Nov 15.
The report said that a member of Jamaat-i-Islami’s youth wing named Shahid Pervez Gilani told a rally in Islamabad on Nov 14 that “anyone who kills the cartoonists will be given a reward of 500,000 rupees.”
The party’s secretary general Syed Munawar Hassan also addressed the rally, urging Pakistan to “lodge a protest with Denmark and expel its ambassador from the country over the publication of the insulting cartoon”.
A spokesman for Jamaat-i-Islami denied offering any reward for the deaths of the cartoonists.
“This is absolutely foolish and baseless news. We do not believe in violence and we never had any such policy because we are a democratic party,” spokesman Shahid Shamsi told AFP.
“However, we are strongly against drawing sketches of our Holy Prophet,” Shamsi said.
Ambassadors of Muslim countries to Denmark protested against the cartoons in October in a letter to the Danish prime minister.
A previously unknown Islamic group called Glory Brigades in Northern Europe also threatened to carry out attacks in the Scandinavian country over the affair, media reported at the time.—AFP
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