Cartoonist lived under armed guard
Lars Vilks, who has died aged 75, was a Swedish artist who attracted international notoriety with his drawings featuring the Prophet Muhammad. Spending his last 10 years under state protection after multiple assassination attempts, Vilks was killed in a traffic collision in Sweden, alongside the two police bodyguards he was travelling with.
In June 2007 Vilks was invited to contribute to an exhibition titled Dogs in Art at a local gallery in the Swedish town of Tallerud. His drawings, which showed the head of the Prophet on the body of a robotic dog, were intended as a comment on political correctness and the limits of art.
“It was said that everything had been done, there are no borders (and) everything is possible in art. And I didn’t believe that at all. I knew, for example, that there was one example of a taboo you never touch, and that is to go into something concerning Islam,” Vilks explained at a free speech conference in 2010.
The gallery, however, got cold feet and the drawings were removed, resurfacing two months later to illustrate an article on censorship in Nerikes Allehanda, a Swedish local newspaper. After the story was picked up by the national broadsheet Jyllands-posten, protests from Islamic groups began.
“It started to spread, and more Muslims were suddenly insulted. There were demonstrations in Pakistan and Bangladesh.” he said. “The president of Iran at the time, Ahmadinejad, said the Jews were behind it. That’s how it turned south on me.”
A fatwa was issued in the name of Abu Omar al-baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State, placing a US$100,000 (74,000 pounds) bounty on Vilk’s head and Sapo, the Swedish security service, started to provide the artist with round-the-clock protection. Vilk told reporters he had taken to sleeping with an axe next to the bed but noted wryly: “I suppose this makes my art project a bit more serious. It’s also good to know how much one is worth.”
The threat to his life was no joke, however. In 2009 three Americans and seven foreign nationals living in Ireland were arrested over a transatlantic plot to assassinate the artist. In 2010 Vilks appeared on an al-qaida hit list alongside Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hebdo who was killed in the attack on the magazine’s offices five years later.