Provocative Swedish cartoonist hunted by al-Qaeda dies in a car crash

Lars Vilks, a Swedish artist who became a target for Islamic extremists after he drew the prophet Muhammad’s head on a dog’s body in 2007, died in a car accident Sunday, along with two police officers charged with his security.

On Sunday afternoon, a police car carrying Vilks and two police officers collided with a truck outside the town of Markaryd on the highway, police said. Both vehicles caught fire and Vilks and the police officers were killed. The truck driver was taken to the hospital.

The cause of the accident was not known, according to the Swedish police, who initially said in a statement late Sunday that two police officers and a “protected person” died in the crash.

Swedish media later reported that the “protected person” was Vilks, who has lived under police protection since 2010, after al-Qaeda offered $100,000 for his death. The Swedish Police Authority eventually confirmed his identity.

The cause of the accident remains under investigation, but “nothing points to an external attack or a terrorist attack or any other vehicles that were involved,” Calle Persson, a police press officer, told The Washington Post.

“We haven’t closed the door yet to the possibility that it could be a crime, but nothing points to that now,” he said, adding that the police were mourning the loss of two of their colleagues.

Vilks’s series of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad were poorly received by many Muslims who considered them deeply insulting to the founder of their faith.

The Swedish cartoonist intended to illustrate a debate about freedom of speech in art, but later told Reuters he was “naive” not to realize his cartoon could spark a furor that extended far beyond Sweden’s borders.

“So unspeakably sad that it would end like this,” tweeted Amanda Lind, Sweden’s minister for Culture and Democracy.

Vilks’s death comes just short of three months after Kurt Westergaard, a Danish cartoonist whose caricature of the prophet Muhammad wearing a turban with a fuse-lit bomb also incensed Muslims, died at 86.

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