Two killed in separate attacks in Denmark

Two people were killed and five police personnel injured in separate shooting attacks in the Danish capital Copenhagen since Saturday evening, according to media reports Sunday.

In the latest incident, one person was killed and two policemen injured in an attack near Copenhagen's main synagogue, police said in a statement early Sunday.

In the earlier incident Saturday evening, a gunman stormed a building in the city and opened fire at a meeting on "Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression".

Significantly, the meeting was being attended by cartoonist Lars Vilks, who had courted controversy for his portrayals of the Prophet Mohammed.

However, police said that it was still not clear whether the latest shooting was connected to the earlier attack, BBC reported.

The police did not clarify when the second incident happened, only saying that "it is still too early to say whether the shooting is related to yesterday's (Saturday's) shootings at Krudttoenden", according to a Xinhua report.

The 68-year-old cartoonist Vilks has been under police protection since August 2007, when he published an extremely controversial caricature of the Prophet Muhammad in Swedish newspaper Nerikes Allehanda.

"It should be possible to insult all religions in a democratic way," he said then, adding, "If you insult one (religion), then you should insult the other ones," according to the CNN report.

Attacks on Vilks followed and two brothers were sentenced to prison terms in 2010 for trying to burn down the cartoonist's house in southern Sweden.

Three other people accused of plotting to murder Vilks at an art exhibition in the Swedish city of Gothenberg were acquitted two years later.

Vilks was one of nine faces on a "Most Wanted" graphic published by the Al Qaeda's Inspire magazine for "crimes against Islam", as was the former editor of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Stephane "Charb" Charbonnier, who was killed in a terrorist attack on his Paris office last month.

The Copenhagen attacks do have resonance with the attack on the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last month, in which two Islamist gunmen killed 12 people, purportedly to avenge the Prophet Muhammad.

Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said after the first attack Saturday that it was a terrorist strike and her country would never bow to violence.

"All resources will be used to find (those responsible) and bring them before a judge," she added.

"We have some difficult days ahead," the prime minister said. "... But in Denmark, we will never bow to violence."

The perpetrators behind the two incidents are still at large.