A Somali man was under heavy guard at a Danish hospital Saturday after police stopped him from killing an artist whose blashphemous sketches of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) outraged the Muslim world, the country's intelligence chief said. Jakob Scharf, head of the PET intelligence agency, said the 28-year-old man with alleged ties to the Al-Qaeda group Al-Shebab broke a window and entered Kurt Westergaard's home in Aarhus Friday night armed with an ax and a knife. The 75-year-old artist, who has received previous death threats, pressed an alarm and fled with his visiting five-year-old granddaughter to a specially made safe room. Officers arrived two minutes later and tried to arrest the assailant, who wielded an ax at a police officer, said Preben Nielsen of the Aarhus police. The officer then shot the man in his knee and his hand, authorities said. The suspect's name was not released in line with Danish privacy rules. Nielsen said he was in serious condition at a hospital but his life was not in danger. Scharf said that the man would be charged with attempted murder for trying to kill Westergaard and the police officer at a hearing later Saturday in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city, 125 miles northwest of Copenhagen. Westergaard was “quite shocked” but was not injured, Nielsen said. In October, terror charges were brought against two Chicago men who planned to kill Westergaard and newspaper's former cultural editor. In 2008, Danish police arrested two Tunisian men suspected of plotting to kill Westergaard. Neither suspect was prosecuted. One was deported and the other was released Monday after an immigration board rejected PET's efforts to expel him from Denmark. Throughout the crisis, then-Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen distanced himself from the sketches but resisted calls to apologize for them, citing “freedom of speech” and saying his government could not be held responsible for the actions of Denmark's press.
