By IANS
Tehran : Iranian lawmakers have demanded the government sever ties with Denmark to protest the republication of a controversial cartoon of Prophet Mohammed in Danish media, official IRNA news agency reported Monday.
In a letter, 16 legislators urged President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Sunday to snap both political and economic ties with Copenhagen to convey Iran’s strong resentment over the “renewed insults by the Danish press against Islam”, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Last Wednesday, a leading Danish newspaper republished the cartoon depicting Prophet Mohammed wearing a bomb shaped like a turban. The republication came a day after the police said they had thwarted an alleged plot to kill the controversial cartoonist Dane Kurt Westergaard, whose cartoons sparked violent protests in 2006.
Iran’s foreign ministry has also summoned the Danish ambassador to Tehran to lodge protest against the republication of the cartoon, which the Islamic country described as an “insult to Islam”.
A foreign ministry spokesman also accused the Danish government Sunday of “not doing enough to confront such moves”.
There have been no demonstrations so far outside the Danish embassy in Tehran, which was attacked by angry Iranian Islamists in 2006.