Danes Told to Leave Indonesia After Terrorist Threat Reported

Denmark has warned its citizens to leave Indonesia after reports of a "significant and imminent" threat by militants in the continuing storm over caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. The warning came as the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, said she feared protests in the Muslim world could "spin out of control".

The Danish foreign ministry issued a statement warning extremists were looking to "actively seek out Danes in protest at the publication of the Muhammad drawings". It added that "significant and imminent danger" existed in eastern Java and that this could spread elsewhere.

The Danish ambassador to Jakarta and his staff left on Saturday, and Danes living in west Java said they had heard that militants planned to "sweep" cities for Danes.

In a further backlash to the furor, Danish police said that around 25 Muslim graves were vandalized at a cemetery in Esbjerg, western Denmark. Several headstones had been smashed into pieces. Christian graves were left untouched.

"I strongly condemn this disgraceful act and deeply regret that Muslim graves have been desecrated," the prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said, adding the perpetrators would be brought to justice.

In Washington, Ms Rice again accused Syria and Iran of stirring up protests in their countries for their own political ends, and warned that fanning the flames was dangerous. "If people continue to incite it, it can spin out of control," she said. "Everybody understands that there’s a sense of outrage ... in the Muslim world. But you don’t express your outrage by going out and burning down embassies ... You express [it] peacefully."

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, will today set out to mend fences with a trip to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and Israel. He struck a conciliatory note yesterday, stressing the "unrestricted mutual respect" which underpinned relations between the EU and the Islamic world.

In Denmark, an opinion poll showed a jump in support for the leading far-right party. Support for the People’s party, the country’s third largest, rose by 3.6 percentage points from last month to 17.8%. It is a key ally of Mr Fogh Rasmussen’s centre-right government. The People’s Party has been highly critical of local Muslim leaders, accusing them of spreading anti-Danish propaganda across the Islamic world. The poll was done early last week as the crisis deepened, and was published yesterday by Jyllands-Posten, the daily which began the controversy by printing the 12 Muhammad cartoons in September.

Last week, Denmark evacuated its embassy staff in Iran and Syria after threats were made against them. One organization in Afghanistan, the Danish People’s Aid, announced yesterday that it was pulling out its Danish staff after a price was set on their heads. Protests against the cartoons continued in several cities around the world yesterday.