STOCKHOLM: Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who had lived under police protection since making a derogatory sketch in 2007, died in a car crash along with two bodyguards on Sunday. He was 75.

Vilks and two plainclothes police officers were killed in a head-on crash with a truck on Sunday afternoon, said the police chief for southern Sweden. All three died on the spot. The 45-year-old truck driver was flown to a hospital with serious injuries.

The police car, which was being driven by one of the bodyguards, had left Stockholm and was heading south when it veered into the path of the truck. Both vehicles then burst into flames. The accident occurred near Markaryd, 100 kilometres north-east of Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city.

“There is nothing else for now that indicates that it was something else but a traffic accident,” Persson told a press conference.

Sweden’s top police official, Anders Thornberg, said an investigation would take place, but was expected to take a relatively long time.

Amanda Lind, the country’s culture minister, called it an extremely tragic traffic accident.

Vilks was largely unknown outside Sweden before 2007, when he drew the sketch.

Al Qaeda had put a bounty on Vilks head. In 2010, two men tried to burn down his house in southern Sweden.

Since that time, Vilks was forced to live under police protection, due to the fact that “he made use of his freedom of expression and his artistic freedom”, Lind said.

Over the years Vilks continued to face death threats. In 2014, a woman from Pennsylvania pleaded guilty in a plot to kill him.

The following year, a free-speech seminar that Vilks attended in Copenhagen, Denmark, was attacked by a lone gunman who killed a Danish film director and wounded three police officers.

Vilks, who was widely believed to have been the intended target of that 2015 attack, was whisked away unharmed by bodyguards. The gunman later killed a Jewish security guard outside a synagogue and wounded two more officers before he was killed in a firefight with police.

Police said they did not know why car the drove into the wrong lane, but they were investigating whether a tyre might have exploded. The car had puncture-proof tyres, police said.

The accident happened on a north-south highway on Sunday afternoon.

Published in Dawn, October 5th, 2021