PARIS (Reuters):
AN INTERNATIONAL row over newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad gathered pace yesterday as more European dailies printed controversial Danish caricatures and Muslims increased pressure to stop them.
A dozen Palestinian gunmen surrounded European Union offices in the Gaza Strip demanding an apology for the cartoons, one of which shows Islam's founder wearing a bomb-shaped turban. Muslims consider any images of Mohammad to be blasphemous.
Palestinian gunmen kidnapped and later released a German from a hotel in the West Bank city of Nablus, witnesses said.
PROTESTS
Earlier, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades threatened at a news conference to kidnap citizens of France, Denmark and Norway if they did not leave Nablus within 72 hours. Newspapers in Germany and Spain have also reprinted the caricatures.
Afghanistan condemned the publication of the caricatures and about 400 Islamic school students set fire to French and Danish flags in protest in the city of Multan in central Pakistan.
The owner of France Soir, a Paris daily that reprinted the cartoons on Wednesday along with a German paper, sacked its managing editor to show "a strong sign of respect for the beliefs and intimate convictions of every individual". But the tabloid defended its right to print the cartoons, first published last September in Danish daily Jyllands-Posten.
ANOTHER CARTOON
Le Temps in Geneva and Budapest's Magyar Hirlap ran another offending cartoon showing an imam telling suicide bombers to stop because Heaven had run out of virgins to reward them.
Several European publications, such as Spain's ABC newspaper and Periodico de Catalunya, showed photographs of papers which had published the cartoons. Other European dailies including France's Le Monde printed cartoons mocking the row. Some politicians criticised the press for fuelling the row.
Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the issue had gone beyond a row between Copenhagen and the Muslim world, and now centred on Western free speech versus taboos in Islam, which is now the second religion in many European countries.
