Kurt Westergaard Cuts Short Norway Visit Due to Possible Attack

A Danish cartoonist targetted by Islamists for his 2005 caricature of the Prophet Mohammed cut short a visit to Norway after police caught wind of a possible attack against him, he said Tuesday.

Kurt Westergaard, 76, has already been the victim of a murder attempt and numerous death threats after drawing the most controversial of the 12 cartoons of the Prophet that appeared in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, depicting his turban with a lit fuse in it.

Westergaard had been scheduled to attend the launch in Oslo on Tuesday of a children’s book for which he provided the illustrations, but he cancelled and returned to Denmark late Monday after Norway’s intelligence agency PST was informed of a possible plot against him.

“I was told to return home immediately, the official version being that I had heart problems,” he told Norwegian broadcaster NRK.

“It’s something that was decided by the Norwegian and Danish intelligence agencies (PST and PET) and so I returned home immediately,” he said, adding that he had no health complaints in reality.

Westergaard lives with 24 hour security after an axe-wielding Somali broke into his hon=me in January 2010.

All of this for a cartoon of Mohammed.