Lars Vilks is no stranger to threats. The Swedish cartoonist is on an al Qaeda hit list and travels everywhere with bodyguards at his side.
He’s survived previous attempts on his life. But Vilks said the shooting at a free speech forum at a Copenhagen cafe was the worst.
At the Saturday event, France’s ambassador to Denmark had just spoken about the recent attack at the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris. A woman from a feminist organization had taken the floor and started to speak.
Vilks realized that something was wrong.
“We suddenly heard a lot of noise. There was a bang, bang, bang, and very quickly we could understand that something was going on,” he told CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield on Sunday.
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“And if you have people who want to go out with guns and start murdering people, the thing you should do is put these people in prison, because we cannot accept people murdering and trying in that way to stop the discussion you have,” he said.
Such conversations, he said, are a key part of free speech and living in a democracy.
The one responsible for the violence “is of course not the one who is following the rules and keeping a reasonable discussion going,” he said. “It’s those people who try to stop it with violence and murder.”
CNN’s Susanne Gargiulo and Holly Yan contributed to this report.
