Danish police arrest 8 Muslims in alleged bomb plot

By Kim McLaughlin

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Danish police arrested eight young Muslims in pre-dawn raids on Tuesday on suspicion of plotting a bomb attack and having links with al Qaeda.

Jakob Scharf, director of the Danish police's Security Intelligence Service, did not say what the alleged target was or in which country.

But he said it was the first such direct al Qaeda connection discovered in Denmark and that Danish intelligence had cooperated with unnamed foreign security services during an investigation that lasted several months.

"These are militant Islamists with connections to high-ranking members of al Qaeda," Scharf told a news conference. "We believe this was a serious situation."

Terror experts said Denmark was a target for extremists because of its military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and a crisis sparked last year after cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammad were published in a Danish newspaper.

"Denmark is on the extremists' radar screen for a number of different reasons -- the first one of course being the controversial Iraq engagement," Magnus Ranstorp, terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense College, told Reuters.

Ranstorp said that a crackdown on asylum-seekers since 2001 and the Prophet cartoon crisis had further aggravated Denmark's exposure.

"For some, this could probably become a catalyst for wanting to exact a price for what they see as an onslaught on Islam."