CAIRO: Egypt on Tuesday summoned the Danish ambassador in Cairo over cartoons deemed offensive to Islam reprinted in Danish newspapers last week, the foreign ministry said in a statement.
The ministry said the ambassador had been summoned “to express Egypt’s rejection of the Danish press’s attempt to repeat the offence to feelings of Muslims and their holy symbols around the world.
The government has also banned the sale of four international newspapers for printing pictures “offensive to Prophet Mohamed, the official MENA news agency reported on Tuesday.
Under a decree issued by Information Minister Anas El Fiqi, Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Welt, Britain’s Observer and the US Wall Street Journal will not be sold, MENA said.
“Any newspaper or magazine which publishes anything offensive to the Prophet … and reprints the offensive caricatures of the Prophet or anything offensive to the three heavenly religions will be banned, Fiqi said.
It was not immediately clear which day’s editions were banned.
On the same day, thousands of university students protested against the reprinting of a cartoon of the Prophet Mohamed in Danish papers calling for a boycott of Danish products, a security source told AFP. The president of Assiut University in southern Egypt led the demonstration by about 4,000 students on the campus ground, the source said.
As the protest ended, hundreds of student supporters of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood gathered at the same spot to condemn the caricatures.
Last week, at least 17 Danish newspapers published the controversial cartoon, vowing to defend freedom of expression a day after Danish police said it had foiled a plot to murder the cartoonist.
The caricature, featuring the Prophet’s head with a turban that looked like a bomb with a lit fuse, was one of 12 cartoons published in September 2005 by the Jyllands-Posten newspaper that sparked bloody riots in the Islamic world. -AFP
