Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update: Geele Found Guilty

BBC News has as smart and succinct a write-up as anyone out there. A 29-year-old Somali man named Mohamed Geele has been convicted on charges of attempted murder and terrorism. The charges arose from an incident where Mr. Geele forcibly entered the home of Danish Cartoons cartoonist Kurt Wesgtergaard on January 1, 2010, with an axe and a knife. Westergaard, at home with a child, jumped into a panic room and called police, who shot Geele when he left the house brandishing his weapons. Geele was acquitted of the attempted murder charge related to assaulting a police officer during that part of the incident, but was convicted of an additional assault charge for throwing his axe at the officer.

Geele had maintained during the trial in Aarhus that he was only trying to scare Westergaard rather than harm him. Westergaard, perhaps the best known of the Danish cartoonist that caricatured Muhammed in a 2005 edition of the newspaper Jyllands-Posten for his striking bomb-in-turban cartoon and his relatively high public profile in the last few years, testfied in court that he feared for his life.

Apparently a factor in the various convictions was the effort brought to light concerning how Geele planned the attacks.

A judge is expected to sentence Geele by the end of the business on Friday.
 
posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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