Gunmen stormed into a Copenhagen building Saturday where controversial cartoonist Lars Vilks and his supporters had gathered, firing shots before driving away from the scene, police and witnesses said.
Helle Merete Brix — the founder of the Lars Vilks Committee, created two years ago in support of the Swedish cartoonist whose portrayals of the Prophet Mohammed angered many in the Muslim world — told CNN that security on site moved her and others to safe areas once they realized a shooting had taken place.
She and Vilks ended up in a storage room together, holding hands, until police told them it was OK to come out.
“We have never taken any chances,” Brix said, pointing to the heavy security from police, Danish intelligence services and Vilks’ own security guards at this and other committee events. “What we have so much been frightened would happen happened tonight.”
The attackers fled the scene in a dark Volkswagen Polo, according to Copenhagen police.
Authorities did not immediately report any casualties. But Danish media said that three police officers were wounded, and Brix said that a civilian may have been shot as well.
A target since cartoon of Mohammed with dog’s body
About 30 people — including Vilks and French diplomat Francois Zimeray, who tweeted later that he is “still alive in the room” — attended Saturday’s event at a theater building in what Brix described as a “very peaceful area of Copenhagen.”
But it didn’t last long, with noise erupting just a few minutes in.
The attackers made it into the lobby but apparently got no further, according to Brix, a journalist and literary critic. She recalled how one man there “acted very quickly and courageously” by pushing a woman down to the ground then putting herself on top of her so she wouldn’t get shot.
Brix said “there’s no doubt about it” that the event — which included a panel on free speech — was targeted because of Vilks, who has “not been able to live a normal life” for years, according to the committee.
“This is … why we set up the committee: to support Mr. Vilks and support his right to freedom of speech,” Brix said.
The shooting occurred just over a month after the massacre at the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had come under fire for its publishing cartoons of Mohammed. Depictions of Mohammed are considered offensive by many Muslims.
Vilks was a target before Charlie Hebdo for his 2007 cartoon of Mohammed with the body of a dog — an animal that conservative Muslims consider unclean.
In a CNN interview later that year from his home in rural Sweden, Vilks said the drawing was a calculated move meant to elicit a rection.
“It should be possible to insult all religions in a democratic way,” he said then. “If you insult one (religion), then you should insult the other ones.”