A TOP German cartoonist has been bombarded with death threats after depicting the national football team of Iran as suicide bombers with explosives strapped to their chests.

Germany was plunged into its own cartoon war when Klaus Stuttmann, a caricaturist for Der Tagesspiegel, decided to criticise a government plan to deploy soldiers during the World Cup, which will take place around the country this summer. Such a deployment would break the postwar convention of not using the German Army to support the police, a subject of intense debate, given the security issues posed by the tournament, which will run from June 9 to July 9.

The cartoon, published on Friday, showed four Iranian players primed to explode alongside four German players dressed in army uniform. “The real reason why the German Army has to be used during the World Cup,” a caption read.

The intent, Herr Stuttmann said, was to mock the German authorities. “The target was not the Iranians,” he said. “The Iranians are sportsmen, like all the other teams. That’s why we don’t need the Army to be involved.” Herr Stuttmann acknowledged that there was room for misunderstanding. He said: “Many Iranians seem to have got the wrong end of the stick and understood the message as being that we need an army deployment because of them.”

Within hours of publication the newspaper and the cartoonist were flooded with e-mailed insults and protests. “You should be ashamed of yourself, you Nazi,” one read. Other correspondents threatened to kill him. The Iranian Embassy yesterday demanded an apology from the newspaper, an influential Berlin daily, and insisted that the editor “make amends for this immoral act”. The authorities advised Herr Stuttmann to sleep at a different address every night for a while.

• An Italian Cabinet minister from the anti-immigrant Northern League is planning to wear T-shirts bearing some of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons that have provoked fury in the Muslim world. “I had some made for me, and from today I will wear some T-shirts with some of the cartoons contested by Islam,” Roberto Calderoli, the Reforms Minister, said.

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