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STOCKHOLM: A Swedish artist who made blasphemous caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in 2007 has reportedly died in a car crash.
According to Swedish media, Lars Vilks was reportedly travelling in a civilian police vehicle that collided with a truck near the town of Markaryd in southern Sweden.
Two police officers were also killed and the truck driver was injured. The truck driver was taken to hospital, and the cause of the collision was under investigation. Police have not revealed the identity of those killed in Sunday’s incident, but Vilks’s partner confirmed the incident to Swedish media.
Vilks, aged 75, lived under police protection after being subjected to death threats over the blasphemous caricatures. In 2015, Vilks’s presence was a central feature of the Copenhagen terror attacks.
He was the speaker at an event where a gunman opened fire, killing a film director and wounding three police officers before going to a synagogue and killing a volunteer guard.
Vilks was largely unknown outside Sweden before his offensive drawing, which caused outrage and led then Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt to meet ambassadors from 22 Muslim countries in an attempt to defuse the situation.
In September 2007, Vilks had a $100,000 bounty placed on his head by an Al-Qaeda faction in Iraq in response to his drawings. In 2010, Swedish newspapers reprinted the blasphemous cartoon after two Muslim men were arrested and subsequently charged in Ireland in connection with an alleged plot to murder Vilks.
Since then he has received numerous death threats and has lived under constant police protection. In 2013, an American woman who called herself ‘Jihad Jane’ was sentenced to 10 years in prison for plotting to kill him.
