LONDON CARTOON PROTESTERS JAILED

Four young British Muslims were jailed for a total of 22 years at the Old Bailey for their role in a protest outside the Danish Embassy in Sloane Street on Feb. 3, 2006 against cartoons depicting and satirizing the Prophet Muhammed. Website designer Mizanur Rahman, 24, of Palmers Green; British Telecoms IT technician Umran Javed, 27, from Birmingham; and Abdul Muhid, 24, of Whitechapel were each jailed for six years. A fourth man, Abdul Saleem, 32, from Poplar in east London, was jailed for four years on a single charge of stirring up racial hatred at the protest in February 2006.The sentences were handed out as a dozen or so supporters of the men sat in the public gallery. Outside the court building, however, there were some 50 or so ‘Islamist’ demonstrators, many of them women in full black burkas covered from head to toe. The convictions arose from the aftermath of an incident when about 300 protesters marched from the Central London Mosque in Regent’s Park to the Danish Embassy in February last year after cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad were published in newspapers in Denmark and other European countries.