Journalists at Jyllands-Posten are expressing relief that a Tampa-hosted source of Internet hacking has been taken down. Still, the respite is a small one, an editor said.
The newspaper and its employees are among Danish interests suffering the backlash from cartoons, including one that depicted the Prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban.
“The fewer, the better, of course, but there are still lots of them,” said Lisbeth Therkildsen, news editor of the paper’s foreign desk, speaking of the hacker site 3asfh.com. The site was taken down Wednesday by Sago, a Tampa hosting company.
Therkildsen, a 26-year veteran of the small Danish daily, said anger from the Muslim world, where displaying images of Muhammad is forbidden, is unlike any she has seen.
“We have our correspondents evacuated out of the Middle East, and in Denmark we have been evacuated from the newspaper two days in a row, while police with bomb-sniffing dogs searched the house,” she wrote in an e-mail Thursday.
“The cartoonists have gone underground and must live with police protection. Our Web site was down for hours three days in a row after hacker-attacks.”
Jyllands-Posten Editor Carsten Juste issued an apology for the cartoon but said he is not ruling out satirizing Muhammad again.
“We are still defending the freedom of expression after having apologized for hurting some people’s religious feelings,” Therkildsen said.
