Danish embassies in Algiers and Kabul evacuated

Copenhagen: Denmark has evacuated staff from its embassies in Algeria and Afghanistan because of terror threats following the reprint in Danish newspapers of a caricature depicting the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), officials said yesterday.

Embassy employees in the Algerian capital, Algiers, and the Afghan capital, Kabul, would continue to work out of "secret locations" in those cities, and would be reachable by phone and e-mail, Foreign Ministry spokesman Erik Laursen said. The threat "is so concrete that we had to take this decision", Laursen told The Associated Press. "The decision is based on intelligence," he added, declining to elaborate.

The Netherlands took similar precautions, announcing yesterday that it had closed its embassy's offices in Kabul two days earlier after reassessing the security situation in the Afghan capital.

Last week, Dutch Embassy personnel in Pakistan shifted to a luxury hotel in Islamabad due to heightened security concerns following the release of a film critical of the Quran by Dutch parliament member Geert Wilders.

The Netherlands has stationed 1,600 troops with the Nato-led security force in southern Afghanistan.

In Copenhagen, Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller suggested Danish embassies in other locations also could be forced to relocate their staff following a warning last month by Al Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden. "There has been a general threat from Al Qaida which means that their cells or people who sympathise with them around the world will try to see where they can fulfil Al Qaida's desires," Moeller said.

The Netherlands announced yesterday that it had closed its embassy's offices in Kabul two days earlier after reassessing the security situation in the Afghan capital.