PARIS, Feb 7: A French weekly accused of insulting Muslims by printing sacrilegious cartoons surprised a court hearing on Wednesday with a letter of support from presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy.

“I prefer an excess of caricatures to an absence of caricatures,” Mr Sarkozy, the conservative Interior Minister who helped launch the French Muslim Council wrote in a letter read out by a lawyer for satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

The letter from the presidential race frontrunner, whose ministry is responsible for religious affairs, drew an angry response from one of the three Muslim groups suing the weekly.

“He should remain neutral,” Abdullah Zekri of the Paris Grand Mosque told journalists outside the court hearing the case on Wednesday and Thursday. A ruling will be handed down later.

Mr Sarkozy, who brought competing Muslim groups together in 2003 to form the Muslim Council to represent Islam in France, noted he had often been ‘a favourite target’ of the weekly but supported ‘the right to smile at everything’.The Grand Mosque, World Islamic League and Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF) sued the magazine for printing two of the Danish caricatures which sparked violence in the Muslim world and adding one of its own.

The groups said the cartoons slandered all Muslims as terrorists.

“This is an attack on Muslims,” UOIF president Lhaj Thami Breze told the court.

Charlie Hebdo publisher Philippe Val said he published the caricatures in February 2006 after the editor-in-chief of the Paris tabloid France Soir was fired for reprinting them.

He said the lack of prompt European support for Denmark as its embassies were attacked in the ME had also upset him.

He said the cartoons targeted Islamist militants: “In no way do they express any contempt for believers of any faith.”

He said religion had no place in the political sphere and that debate and criticism were essential elements of a democracy.

“What is sacred for a religion is sacred only for believers of that religion,” he told the court. “If we respected all the taboos of all religions, where would we be?”

Charlie Hebdo has called more than a dozen politicians and intellectuals as witnesses, including Francois Bayrou, a centrist candidate in the presidential vote in April and May.”—Reuters