Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update: Mohammed Geele On Trial

The 29-year-old Somali man shot and arrested by police after breaking into Danish Cartoons Cartoonist Kurt Westergaard's home with an axe and a knife on January 1, 2010 will admit to the the breaking and entering but seek to convince the court that he only wished to share the most notorious of the 2005 caricaturists of Muhammad in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper. That man's sure-to-be highly publicized trial began earlier today in an Aarhus Appeals Court after a district courtroom was deemed too small for the reporters and other onlookers on hand. Mohammed Geele is charged with attempted terrorism, attempted murder, attacking a police officer and illegal arms possession. He faces life in prison

Geele's lawyer Niels Strauss told the court his client cops to the illegal arms possession and a breaking and entering charge (not entered, as far as I know.)

Cartoonist Westergaard will face his would-be attacker in court. He is expected to tell from his own viewpoint what has been widely reported as his being home alone with a five-year-old granddaughter at the time of Geele's forced entry, and the septuagenarian's retreat into a converted panic room to phone police, who arrived minutes after his distress call. Also expected to be part of the trial is an examination of Geele's ties to the al-Shebab Islamist insurgent movement prominent in parts of Somalia.

The cartoons from Westergaard and others published in September 2005 continue to make news, with a plot to murder staff at Jyllands-Posten foiled by authorities in late December 2010. The Geele trial should last a little more than a week and a verdict is expected before Valentine's Day.
 
posted 9:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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