LONDON — A gunman on Saturday fired shots into a Copenhagen cafe that was hosting a public event on freedom of speech, featuring a Swedish artist who had received death threats for a 2007 cartoon he drew caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad. The Danish police said that one man, age 40, had been killed and three police officers wounded, but that the gunman had been unable to enter the Krudttoenden cafe.
The Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, said Saturday evening that the shooting had been a terrorist attack and that the nation was on high alert.
The artist, Lars Vilks, 68, was unharmed, and the police said Saturday evening that there had been only one gunman, after initially reporting that there were two. The gunman, wearing a black parka and a maroon balaclava over his head, fled in a dark Volkswagen Polo, which was later found empty. The French ambassador to Denmark, who was at the event, wrote on Twitter that he was also unharmed.
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Other Swedish galleries also declined to show the drawings, but in August 2007, a regional newspaper, Nerikes Allehanda, published one of them to illustrate an editorial on self-censorship and freedom of religion. Protests and death threats ensued.
In 2010, the police discovered plots against Mr. Vilks’s life, and he was assaulted that year while giving a lecture on free speech at Uppsala University. Last year, a Pennsylvania woman was sentenced to a 10-year prison term for a plot to kill him, and in 2010, two brothers were jailed after they tried to burn down his house.
