Two men, who were accused of plotting to attack a Danish newspaper for publishing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, have been found guilty inNorway.
Ringleader Mikael Davud was sentenced to seven years by theOslodistrict court, while his accomplice Shawan Sadek Saeed was jailed for three and a half years.
The court also found that Davud had planned the attack with the al-Qaida.
A third defendant David Jakobsen, was cleared of terror charges, but was convicted of aiding the others in gaining explosives. He was sentenced to four months.
Detectives say that the terror plot was linked to the same al-Qaeda members who planned the attacks against theNew Yorksubway system, as well as a British shopping mall in 2009.
Davud, a Norwegian citizen, denied he was taking orders from al-Qaeda and said that the raid he planned was prompted by him alone.
He said that the raid was against the Chinese Embassy inOslo, in revenge forBeijing’s oppression of Uighurs, a Muslim minority.
Davud also said that his accomplices helped him acquire the ingredients to make the bombs, but they didn’t know he was planning a terror attack.
Prosecutors said that Davud first wanted to attack Danish newspaper Jllands-Posten, whose 12 cartoons of Muhammad provoked outrage from the Muslim communities in 2006.
But the Norwegian then changed his plans to target one of the cartoonists instead.
Bukak, an Iraqi Kurd, said the newspaper and the cartoonist were planned victims, but claimed that the notion was “just talk.”
Prosecutors had to prove that the defendants worked together in the plot, because a single individual planning an attack is not covered underNorway’s anti-terror laws.
