NEWSPAPERS across Europe yesterday republished caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that have inflamed the Muslim world since they first appeared in Denmark.

Daily newspapers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands featured the 12 cartoons, which have caused a firestorm in the Islamic world.

Editors expressed a wish to show solidarity with the Editor of the Jyllands-Posten in Denmark, whose cartoons triggered violent protests in Gaza, a boycott of Danish goods across the Arab world and death threats against the newspaper’s senior staff. The paper’s offices had to be evacuated last night after the second bomb threat in two days.

Showing any depiction of Muhammad is deemed blasphemous and these were seen as particularly offensive, with one portraying the Prophet wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb. Under the headline “Yes, we have the right to caricature God”, France Soir covered its front with Buddha, the Christian and Jewish deities and the Prophet all sitting on a cloud. The Christian God says: “Don’t complain Muhammad, all of us have been caricatured.”

Shortly after the paper appeared, however, its managing editor, Jacques Lefranc, was sacked. Raymond Lakah, the paper’s owner, issued a public apology: “We express our regrets to the Muslim community and all people who were shocked by the publication” of the cartoons, he said.

French officials privately shuddered over the likely damage to relations with Muslims at home and abroad but ministers defended France Soir’s freedom to publish what it wanted. After a Cabinet meeting with President Chirac, Jean-François Copé, a minister and government spokesman, said: “France is attached to the freedom of expression”, but adding that respect should always be shown for the beliefs of others.

The French Council for the Muslim Religion, the state-sponsored body that groups the country’s big Islamic community, reacted with anger to the re-publication of the cartoons. Dalil Boubakeur, the council president, said that France Soir had “perpetrated a real provocation in the eyes of millions of French Muslims”.

France Soir published all 12 Danish cartoons and deplored what it called the new inquisition by “backward bigots” in a Muslim world that knew little democracy.

In Berlin, Die Welt reprinted one cartoon on its front page and three others inside. “The protests from Muslims would be taken more seriously if they were less hypocritical,” it said. “When Syrian television showed drama documentaries in prime time depicting rabbis as cannibals, the imams were quiet.” Roger Koeppel, Editor of Die Welt, told The Times: “We owed it to our readers. They have to understand what the fuss is about.”

In Italy some of the cartoons appeared in Corriere della Sera and La Stampa. Both newspapers said that the decision to publish had been taken on purely journalistic grounds.

Paolo Lepri, the acting foreign editor of Corriere della Sera, said that it was not a political decision. “We simply felt that you could not explain to readers why the cartoons had caused such a furore without showing them some examples by way of illustration”.

Signor Lepri said that the newspaper’s editors had chosen to illustrate the article with the least offensive cartoons. La Stampa, by contrast, published the “turban bomb” cartoon in yesterday’s edition to illustrate a report on the dispute. It said that it had done so because this was the drawing that has “stirred up the most fuss”.

The Spanish daily El Periodico published a montage of the cartoons under the headline “The Effects of Terrorism: A Test”. Carlos-Enrique Bayo, foreign editor of El Periodico, said: “We don’t normally shy away from things like this. Publish and be damned, as they say.”

Señor Bayo said that his newspaper had received no complaints from readers. “We have in the past received complaints about cartoons about Israel from Jewish groups, so our readers know we are not pro or anti-Muslim,” he added.

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