The artist, who had escaped an assassination attempt in 2015, died in a road accident, Sunday, October 3, with two of his bodyguards.
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When we wanted the interviewer, we had to contact the police unit responsible for his safety in the south of Sweden. Only the date of the appointment was fixed in advance, the place being revealed only at the last moment. Threatened to have caricatured Muhammad in a drawing in 2007, Lars Vilks lived under police protection since 2010. After the attack against Charlie Hebdo, on January 7, 2015, he had to leave his house. Five weeks later, on February 14, he was in turn the target of an attack in Copenhagen. He escaped unscathed, but a Danish director had been killed.
Sunday, October 3, it is in an accident from the road that Lars Vilks died at the age of 75, with two of his bodyguards. The criminal track has been ruled out. But the violence of the crash and what was able to cause the accident feed the discussions in Sweden: Why a little before 15:30, at Markaryd’s height, a small village of the center of Sweden, does the vehicle brutally Past the safety slide on the E4 motorway, to hit hard a truck that came in reverse and take fire?
The privileged hypothesis is that of the bursting of a tire. The driver would have lost control of the vehicle. The newspapers, however, revealed that the car – a shielded Range Rover, capable of resisting an attack at grenade and even at the bomb – had successfully passed the technical control. Witnesses claimed that the vehicle was rolling at 160 kilometers per hour.
HATE COMMENTS
While waiting for the conclusions of the investigation, the death of Lars Vilks was celebrated in Islamist environments abroad, but also by some Muslims in Sweden. Based in Malmö, the online media and Arabic Aktar confirmed that he had erased hundreds of hateful comments, published after the accident. On his Facebook page, there are still many messages welcoming the artist’s violent death.
There are those too, in Sweden, who felt that Lars Vilks had sought the troubles in Caricatur Muhammad and abnormally found that the taxpayer finances his closer protection. Among them, some do not hesitate to accuse it today to have indirectly caused the death of its two bodyguards.
In the press, the companion of the artist – remained anonymous for security reasons – shared his anger. The couple, who had met in 1989, had asked to settle home, but the police had always refused, arguing that she could not protect them both. Lasse War, Lars Vilks had seized the mediator of justice in 2020, without gaining cause.
If most politicians in the country have expressed their dismay to the announcement of his death, however, the damage remained measured. Lars Vilks was “radioactive”, notes the journalist Niklas Orrenius, author of a book on the Copenhagen attack. In the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper, the Torbjörn Elensky essayist denounces “the cowardice and betrayal of Swedish intellectuals”.
Considered as an eternal provocative – what he claimed – the septuagenarian was kept at a distance by the cultural institutions of the kingdom, rarely invited and never exposed. In the south of Sweden, the municipality of Höganäs, who had spent years fighting his gigantic sculptures, nimis (float wood) and ARX (stone), built illegally and become tourist attractions, decided to Make a protected site.
