STOCKHOLM - The head of a Swedish newspaper has received death threats after publishing a drawing of the devil defecating on Jesus, he said Tuesday.
"I have been exposed to various threats ... and I have interpreted several of them as death threats," said Ola Sigvardsson, editor in chief for Ostgota Correspondenten daily.
He said one person had left a message saying he wanted to see the editor's throat slit and that "if no one dealt with it, then Jesus would do it".
The drawing, published March 1, was part of a poster for a punk festival in Linkoping in southern Sweden. Shortly before the festival began, municipal employees pulled the poster off the city's information boards.
Sigvardsson decided to publish the drawing because he saw the removal of the poster as an act of "censorship".
"It was our duty to tell what happened, and to do it we had to also show the image," he said.
Sigvardsson has filed a complaint with the police. No special security measures have been put in place for the editor, though police are taking the threats seriously, said police inspector Mats Allard.
Last year, an Al-Qaeda front organisation in Iraq offered rewards to anyone who killed two Swedes behind a cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a dog.
The publication of the sketch in Nerikes Allehanda on August 18 sparked a fiery debate in the media on the limits of freedom of expression, and prompted protests by Muslims in the western town of Oerebro, where the newspaper is based.
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