It seems sadly serendipitous, if not actually ominous, that a year that started with a depressing but thankfully failed cartoon-related terrorist attack here in Denmark, ends with another one. Five people, one Iraqi asylum seeker and four Swedes/Swedish residents, were arrested yesterday on charges of planning a terrorist attack on the headquarters of Jyllands-Posten, the paper that commissioned and published the 12 Muhammad cartoons back in 2005, and the center-left daily Politiken, which shares the building with them.
PET claims they had advanced plans for a Mumbai-style attack on the newspaper, although the information released is pretty sparse. The police have confiscated a submachine gun with a silencer in the car in which they were arrested, and the group had been under surveillance for a while, but other than that, we haven’t been told much.
Added to the crippled moron who blew himself up in Copenhagen earlier this year, and his no less foolish-seeming compadre in Stockholm last month, I guess it’s only a matter of time before someone actually manages to carry off an attack around these parts. Depressing to thus see the pernicious hypothesis of the Jyllands-Posten editors — that there was a real threat, and that artists felt it — confirmed, having become partly a self-fulfilled prophecy.