New Delhi: Swedish artist, Lars Vilks, who had been under police protection since 2007, was killed in a traffic accident along with two police officers traveling with him. The 75-year-old artist was traveling in a civilian police vehicle that collided with a truck near the town of Markrid in southern Sweden.
Vilks, who was mostly unknown outside Sweden before his sketch of the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog, received death threats.
On Sunday, Wilkes was traveling in a civilian vehicle with two policemen in plain clothes when it crashed head-on with a truck. While Vilks and police officers died on the spot, the 45-year-old truck driver was seriously injured and taken to a nearby hospital, Carina Persson, the southern Sweden’s police chief told reporters, according to the AP.
The police vehicle, which had left Stockholm and was heading south, overturned on the way of the truck and caught fire in both vehicles, the official said. The accident happened near Markrid, about 100 kilometers northeast of Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city.
The cause of the accident was being investigated.
In a 2007 sketch, Wilkes made a sketch of the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog humiliating the Muslim community. Dogs are considered unclean by Orthodox Muslims, and Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the Prophet.
Vilks had initially planned to display the picture in an exhibition at the Swedish Cultural Heritage Centre, but the picture was shelved over safety concerns. This went largely unnoticed until a Swedish newspaper printed the picture with an editorial defending freedom of expression.
Al-Qaeda placed a bounty on Wilkes’ head. In 2010, two men tried to burn down his house in southern Sweden. In 2014, a Pennsylvania woman pleaded guilty to conspiracy to kill him. He faced threats to his life over the years, the following year during a free-speech seminar that Wilkes attended in Copenhagen, Denmark, he was attacked by a lone gunman who killed a Danish film director. and injured three police officers.
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