A police officer stood guard in central Copenhagen, Denmark, after shots were fired near a synagogue on Sunday.rn
The attack there came only hours after a gunman sprayed bullets into a cafe where a cartoonist who had caricatured the prophet Mohammad was speaking.”
LONDON — The Copenhagen police said on Sunday that they had shot and killed a man they believed carried out two attacks that left two people dead, one at a cafe and one outside a synagogue, and wounded at least five policemen.
The first attack took place on Saturday, when a gunman sprayed bullets into the cafe where a Swedish cartoonist who had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad was speaking, killing one man. Hours later, early Sunday, a man was shot and killed outside the city’s main synagogue, according to the police.
Dan Rosenberg Asmussen, a leader of Denmark’s Jewish community, told the Danish public broadcaster DR that the victim at the synagogue was a young Jewish man who was guarding the entrance of a building adjacent to the synagogue. He said that some 80 people were inside the synagogue at the time, celebrating a Bat Mitzvah, and that the police had been asked to provide protection after the cafe shooting.
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He said artists and satirists should not tread more carefully in their criticism of Islam than they would in criticizing any other religion. “Almost the entire Muslim world is subject to a theological rule that has a strange outcome when it comes to human rights,” he said. “You can’t ignore that. Then you’re talking tactics, how should one go about to change that. Some say you should be very careful, but that’s just postponing the problem. Sooner or later, you have to explain what you’re criticizing.”
Mr. Vilks is also known as a conceptual sculptor and something of a provocateur, building sculptures in protected nature reserves in Sweden. He originally drew his Muhammad cartoons for a local art exhibition, which withdrew them, fearing protests. 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 while giving a lecture on free speech at Uppsala University in Sweden. 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 trying to burn down his house.
Michael Forsythe contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
