Denmark has evacuated staff from its embassies in Algeria and Afghanistan because of terror threats following the reprint in Danish newspapers of a caricature depicting the Prophet Mohammed, officials said on Wednesday.
Embassy employees in the Algiers and Kabul would continue to work out of “secret locations” in those cities, and would be reachable by phone and e-mail, Foreign Ministry spokesman Erik Laursen said.
The threat “is so concrete that we had to take this decision,” Laursen said.
“The decision is based on intelligence,” he added, declining to elaborate.
The Netherlands took similar precautions, announcing on Wednesday that it had closed its embassy’s offices in Kabul two days earlier after reassessing the security situation in the Afghan capital.
Last week, Dutch Embassy personnel in Pakistan shifted to a luxury hotel in Islamabad because of heightened security concerns following the release of a film critical of the Koran by Dutch parliament member Geert Wilders.
The Netherlands has stationed 1,600 combat troops with the NATO-led security force in southern Afghanistan.
In Copenhagen, Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller suggested Danish embassies in other locations also could be forced to relocate their staff following a warning last month by al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
“There has been a general threat from al-Qaeda which means that their cells or people who sympathize with them around the world will try to see where they can fulfill al-Qaeda’s desires,” Moeller said in a TV interview. “Therefore I can certainly not say that they are the last two embassies [to be evacuated].”
In an audio recording posted on a militant Web site on March 19, bin Laden warned of a “severe” reaction against Europe over the republishing of the cartoon.
Danish intelligence officials have warned of an “aggravated” terror threat against Denmark because of the Feb. 13 reprinting of the drawing, which showed Mohammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban. It was one of the 12 Danish prophet cartoons that sparked riots in the Muslim world in 2006.
More than a dozen newspapers reprinted the cartoon, saying they wanted to support free speech after police revealed a plot to kill the creator of the caricature.
Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet, even favorable, for fear it could lead to idolatry.
The Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that employees had been moved from the Danish embassies in Algiers and Kabul “because of terror threats.”
Laursen said the employees in Algiers were relocated “some days ago,” while the staff in Kabul was moved on Wednesday.
“Right now, we are in places that we consider safe,” he said.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
RSS