My oldest copy is the 1905-1906 8th edition

Queen Victoria was celebrating her Diamond Jubilee, Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac was playing to packed houses in Paris, and the adventurersome (including Jack London) were heading to the Klondike in search of gold in 1897, the year in which Baily’s Monthly Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, founded in 1860, began issuing its annual Directory of Hunting, listing organized fox hunts in Britain. The listings were later extended to beagles, bassets, otter and mink hounds, and its coverage made world-wide.

Charles Moore reported recently, in the Telegraph that, despite Labour’s tyrannical hunt ban, Baily’s is not only continuing publication, but is this year, for the first time, available on-line by electronic subscription.

Since the 19th century, the facts of hunting have been compiled annually by Baily’s Hunting Directory. Like Jane Austen’s Sir Walter Elliot in relation to the Baronetage, I find Baily’s my “occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one”. Between its red covers is contained a mass of information about almost every known and recognised pack of hounds in the world. According to the count for 2009, there are now 761 of them. You learn something new, interesting and satisfyingly obscure every time you read it. You also feel a thrill because of the adversity which hunting has so successfully resisted. As Lt Gen Barney White-Spunner says in his spirited introduction to the latest edition, the loss of liberty always “stirs something deep in the British soul”.

I mention the red covers, but in fact the cover turned black in recent editions, in mourning at the ban. This year, for the first time, Baily’s goes online . The publishers say that they still want to produce the book version as well – and I hope they succeed – but a web version undoubtedly offers certain advantages over a book. One is that new photographs can be posted at any time, so the site already carries first-class pictures of the current season. Another is that any subscriber (annual price £12) can contribute his own report of his hunt.

I have happily subscribed.

The print version costs £44.95/US$107 and may be ordered here.

Training IDF dog

Haaretz has some fun tauntingly adopting a mock-PC tone while reporting an obviously successful profiling technique as officially denied.

Are IDF dogs trained to pounce all who say ‘God is great‘ in Arabic?

The Israel Defense Forces has denied allegations that it trains its canines to attack anybody heard saying Allah Hu Akbar, Arabic for ‘God is great.’

Israeli Arab MK Ahmed Tibi on Monday told the Knesset plenum that at a canine unit ceremony held the day before, parents of the soldiers witnessed demonstrations proving these allegations.

“IDF dogs are trained to pounce and attack any Arab who shouts Allah Hu Akbar, as a Pavlovian reaction,” said Tibi.

Said Ali al-Shihri, Ibrahim Suleiman al Rubaish (image ID not confirmed); Abdullah Saleh Ali al Ajmi; and Abdullah Mahsud thought the US was pretty stupid to let them go free to resume the fight

The London Times reports that early releases of detainees believed to be less dangerous resulted in a large number of cases of speedy returns to waging holy war against the West, sometimes in prominent leadership roles.

As the Obama Administration tries fulfilling its commitment to empty the prison facility at Guantanamo, prospective beneficiaries of repatriation will inevitably include precisely those detainees considered too obviously guilty and too certain to return to terrorist activities to be released earlier.

At least a dozen former Guantánamo Bay inmates have rejoined al-Qaeda to fight in Yemen, The Times has learnt, amid growing concern over the ability of the country’s Government to accept almost 100 more former inmates from the detention centre.

The Obama Administration promised to close the Guantánamo facility by January 22, a deadline that it will be unable to meet. The 91 Yemeni prisoners in Guantánamo make up the largest national contingent among the 198 being held.

Six prisoners were returned to Yemen last month. After the Christmas Day bomb plot in Detroit, US officials are increasingly concerned that the country is becoming a hot-bed of terrorism. …

The country’s mountainous terrain, poverty and lawless tribal society make it, in the opinion of many analysts, a close match for Afghanistan as a new terrorist haven. ..

A Yemeni, Hani Abdo Shaalan, who was released from Guantánamo in 2007, was killed in an airstrike on December 17, the Yemeni Government reported last week. The deputy head of al-Qaeda in the country is Said Ali al-Shihri, 36, who was released in 2007. Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaish, who was released in 2006, is a prominent ideologue featured on Yemeni al-Qaeda websites. …

The US Government issued figures in May showing that 74 of the 530 detainees in Guantánamo were suspected or known to have returned to terrorist activity since their release. They included the commander of the Taleban in Helmand province, Mullah Zakir, whom the British Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup, called “a key and seemingly effective tactical leader”. Among others who returned to terrorism was Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi, a Kuwaiti who killed six Iraqis in Mosul in 2008.

The number believed to have “returned to the fight” in the May 2009 estimate was double that of a US estimate from June 2008. US officials acknowledged that more detainees were known to have reoffended since, but the number has been classified.

“There is a historic trend and it continues. I will only say that we have said there is a trend, we are aware of it, there is no denying the trend and we are doing our best to deal with this reality,” Mr Morrell said.

Officials said that a higher proportion of those still being held were likely to return to terrorism because they were considered more of a security threat than those selected in the early stages of the release programme.

MSNBC has more details on the circumstances of the disaster at FOB Chapman.

The suicide bombing on a CIA base in Afghanistan last week was carried out by a Jordanian doctor who was an al-Qaida double agent, Western intelligence officials told NBC News.

Initial reports said that the attack, which killed seven CIA officers, was carried out by a member of the Afghan National Army.

According to Western intelligence officials, the perpetrator was Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, 36, an al-Qaida sympathizer from the town of Zarqa, which is also the hometown of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant Islamist responsible for several devastating attacks in Iraq.

Al-Balawi was arrested by Jordanian intelligence more than a year ago. However, the Jordanians believed that al-Balawi had been successfully reformed and brought over to the American and Jordanian side, setting him up as an agent and sending him off to Afghanistan and Pakistan to infiltrate al-Qaida.

His specific mission, according to officials, was to find and meet Ayman al Zawahiri, al-Qaida’s No. 2, also a physician.

However, the Al-Jazeera Web site quoted a Taliban spokesman who said al-Balawi misled Jordanian and U.S. intelligence services for a year. The spokesman, Al-Hajj Ya’qub, promised to release a video confirming his account of the attack.

Last week, according to the Western officials, al-Balawi reportedly called his handler to say he needed to meet with the CIA’s team based in Khost, Afghanistan, because he said he had urgent information he needed to relay about Zawahiri.

His handler was a senior intelligence official, identified in Jordanian press accounts as Sharif Ali bin Zeid.

But bin Zeid was not just a Jordanian intelligence officer; he was also a member of the Jordanian royal family and was a first cousin of the king and grandnephew of the first king Abdullah.

Bin Zeid’s prominent role offers rare insight into the close partnership between American and Jordanian intelligence officials and how crucial their relationship has become to the overall counterterrorism strategy.

“We have a close partnership with the Jordanians on counterterrorism matters,” a U.S. official told The Washington Post. “Having suffered serious losses from terrorist attacks on their own soil, they are keenly aware of the significant threat posed by extremists.”

Jordan’s official news agency, Petra, said bin Zeid was killed “on Wednesday evening as a martyr while performing the sacred duty of the Jordanian forces in Afghanistan” and provided no further details about his death.

Douglas Farrah observes that if you let them build a base, terrorists will come.

The recent and growing attention to the critical situation in Yemen, where al Qaeda’s presence is spreading and the government is weak and does not control much of the physical space, is perhaps the best argument for pursuing a vigorous Afghanistan policy.

It is clear that the jihadist movement, to reuse an overused cliche, will flow like water downhill, taking the paths of least resistance. Yemen, with its declining oil revenues, weak central government, inhospitable geography and population that is at least intellectually in tune with al Qaeda’s fundamentalist theology, is such a place. It has the added benefit and symbolic value for Osama bin Laden and his family of being their ancestral home, from whence bin Laden’s father came to Saudi Arabia.

Radical Islamists need different spaces for different reasons. Criminalized states allow them to move money and generate funds. Failed or failing states with a strongly sympathetic population in which to move undetected afford something even more valuable – the chance to establish a physical space that is part of their vision of the Caliphate, or Allah’s kingdom on earth. …

This is of primary importance to the Islamist community, and one that highlights the reasons for such fierce fighting and penetration in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. It is not so much the training camps and safe havens that draw the Islamist combatants to these regions. It is the possibility of creating a divinely-mandated earthly government under the rule of Sharia law (as they interpret it).

Afghanistan is another such place, now part of the mythical narrative the movement is creating as it moves forward. If the Taliban can succeed there, not only will it be a sign of divine favor but a place where Allah rules. Once that is established, the global jihadists have a place from which to expand and continue the war against the infidel world.

Yemen has already shown the danger of allowing these groups to settle in and become a focal point for teaching and training of would-be “martyrs” from around the world. If the base exists, they will come. At its center, al Qaeda understood this from the beginning.

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And not only will they come, Barack Obama will send some of the ones currently in Guantanamo to join them.

Byron York:

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said the administration “absolutely” intends to keep sending Guantanamo prisoners to Yemen. The administration has sent seven detainees to the country, Brennan said, with six of those sent in December. “Several of those detainees were put into Yemeni custody right away,” Brennan said. He did not elaborate on how many is “several” or where the other Guantanamo inmates sent to Yemen might be today. But he said the U.S. has faith in Yemen to handle the situation.

As found in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) by Neoneocon commenter Jim Sullivan:

It’s OK to kill things as long as you use a bow and arrow and not a gun or missile.

Teh Interwebz au Naturale of the Allmother (or whatever the f*** the Giganto-smurfs called her) beats the technology of a species that has harvested the power of the atom, is capable of celestial travel, and has armored the unholy f*** out of everything. Also:

It’s a much better way to call up your bizarro world rhino and pterodactyl allies (the ones that previously wanted to eat you) than a Tarzan call or a Conch shell. But, you still have to send the Dire-pony express to the Four Corners of the world to rally the tribes.

Soldiers are bad unless they are A) not Caucasian or B) handi-capped. All other soldiers are A)psychopaths B) mindless myrmidons or C) nameless cannon fodder (or in this case arrow fodder)

Even shallow, selfish, homicidal savages are good because they’re…savages and therefore inherently and unquestionably noble.

The best way for primitive screw-heads to fight off a technologically superior, militarily sophisticated force is to fight the superior force on their terms. Asymmetric strategy, insurgent tactics and guerrilla warfare couldn’t possibly even the odds. Not in a million years.

All scientists are compassionate and resent the very soldiers prepared to die to protect them. This is completely reasonable and in no way intellectually dishonest. Hollywood decrees it!

Subjugating other species is wrong… unless you are able to have mind-blowing ponytail intercourse and biologically hack into their brain. Then it’s OK.

When you encounter a new mineral that floats and causes whole mountain ranges to float, the coolest, catchiest, most marketable name for it is Unobtainium. After you succeed in mining it, it semantically transforms,a la magma/lava, into HaHaHa!It’sAllMine-ite.

When the nobly savage Giganto-smurfs, the Emo-scientists and their Land-networked planetary defense menagerie evict the eeevil military-capitalist Gestapo from their idyllic floating mountain paradise back to their ecologically dead world, the nature frolickers all live happily ever after. There’s no chance in hell that those same military-capitalists will return with a full blown invasion fleet. Never happen. Hollywood decrees it!

Hat tip to Vanderleun via the Barrister.

Irish Times 2:59 narrated slide show of a recent day with the Waterford Hunt.

Clodion, Montesquieu, Musée du Louvre, Paris

Paul Rahe, who has written a book on Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, posts on Montesquieu’s valuable observations on the changes marking the transition into Modernity in politics, religion, and war.

Montesquieu was the first to recognize that, at the end of the seventeenth century, a profound and arguably permanent transformation had taken place in European politics. He saw that commerce had replaced war as the force dominant in international relations; that a well-ordered Carthage could now defeat Rome on the field of the sword; and that, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, Great Britain – with its separation of powers, its policy of religious toleration, its devotion to industry and trade, and its empire over the sea – had come to occupy a pre-eminence that no existing continental power could hope to challenge. That European monarchy – with its hereditary aristocracy, its ethos of honor, its suspicion of trade, and its appetite for conquest, empire, and glory – could not be sustained in an age in which money had become the sinews of war: this he also knew.

In Montesquieu’s opinion, two successive revolutions, neither likely to be reversed, provided this transformation in politics with its underpinning. The first of these took place in the sphere of religion. Montesquieu was persuaded that Machiavelli was correct in supposing that, when Christianity supplanted paganism, it made classical republicanism obsolete.

When the virtue of the ancients was “in full force,” Montesquieu writes in The Spirit of Laws, “they did things that we no longer see & which astonish our little souls.” If his contemporaries are unable to rise to the same level, it is, he suggests, because the “education” given the ancients “never suffered contradiction” while “we receive three educations different” from and even “contrary” to one another: “that of our fathers, that of our schoolmasters, that of the world. What we are told in the last overthrows the ideas imparted by the first two.” In short, there is now “a contrast between the engagements” which arise “from religion” and “those” which arise “from the world” that “the ancients knew nothing of.” This is why the moderns possess such “little souls.”

Read the whole thing.

Glenn Reynolds yesterday found the above photo on the White Houses’s Flicker page and posted it (along with the enlarged detail below) inviting readers to “interpret the body language.”

Barack Obama has always been a mirror, reflecting back to individual members of the American public their own preconceptions, and the Instapundit selection provides a perfect opportunity for a wide range of interpretation.

I, for instance, thought Obama looked like the Godfather contemptuously rebuking an incompetent consigliere.

Over on Flicker, MCarrier1 thought Obama looked like James Bond.

Hot Air immediately launched a caption contest, where FishGov offered:

The Emperor Obama: [to the Senate] In order to ensure our security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society which I assure you will last for ten thousand years.

Biden: [to Emperor Obama] So this is how liberty dies… with thunderous applause.

Ann Althouse, on the other hand, just thought The man is tired and it’s a way to get above it all. And that’s the other thing I see in that face: He’s tired and he’s floating above it all.

Andrew Sullivan had to puzzle for a while over what exactly Glenn Reynolds was trying to pull posting this cryptic photo, (a)nd then I realized why this photo immediately strikes some people are damning. Obama is a black man who looks as if he is condescending to a white man. That’s political gold.

ABC News reports that Wednesday’s suicide attack was the result of the unprecedented infiltration of the Agency by jihadi opponents employing a double agent who had successfully gained the trust of CIA officers.

The losses inflicted by the suicide attack were key personnel central to the Agency’s drone attack program whose regional expertise and experience will be very difficult to replace.

The suicide bomber who killed at least six Central Intelligence Agency officers in a base along the Afghan-Pakistan border on Wednesday was a regular CIA informant who had visited the same base multiple times in the past, according to someone close to the base’s security director.

The informant was a Pakistani and a member of the Wazir tribe from the Pakistani tribal area North Waziristan, according to the same source. The base security director, an Afghan named Arghawan, would pick up the informant at the Ghulam Khan border crossing and drive him about two hours into Forward Operating Base Chapman, from where the CIA operates.

Because he was with Arghawan, the informant was not searched, the source says. Arghawan also died in the attack.

The story seems to corroborate a claim by the Taliban on the Pakistani side of the border that they had turned a CIA asset into a double agent and sent him to kill the officers in the base, located in the eastern Afghan province of Khost.

The infiltration into the heart of the CIA’s operation in eastern Afghanistan deals a strong blow to the agency’s ability to fight Taliban and al Qaeda, former intelligence officials say, and will make the agency reconsider how it recruits Pakistani and Afghan informants.

The officers who were killed in the attack were at the heart of the United States’ effort against senior members of al Qaeda and the Taliban, former intelligence officials say. They collected intelligence on the militant commanders living on both sides of the border and helped run paramilitary campaigns that tired to kill those commanders, including the drone program that has killed a dozen senior al Qaeda with missiles fired from unpiloted aircraft.

The former intelligence officials all say the CIA will be able to replace those who were killed, but the officials acknowledge the attack killed decades of knowledge held by some of the agency’s most informed experts on the region, the Taliban and al Qaeda. It also killed at least one officer who had been part of the agency’s initial hunt for Osama bin Laden in the mid-1990s.

“This is a tremendous loss for the agency,” says Michael Scheuer, a former CIA analyst who led the bin Laden unit. “The agency is a relatively small organization, and its expertise in al Qaeda is even a smaller subset of that overall group.”

At least 13 officers gathered in the base’s gym to talk with the informant, suggesting he was highly valued. His prior visits to the base and his ability to get so close to so many officers also suggests that he had already provided the agency with valuable intelligence that had proven successful, former intelligence officials say.

That information was most likely linked with the CIA’s drone program on the Pakistani side of the border. …

The most likely Taliban group to have perpetrated the attack is the one led by Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, one of the CIA’s most important assets when the agency was helping fund the Afghan mujahedeen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Haqqanis have been running militant operations for 30 years and have recently become perhaps the most lethal commanders targeting U.S. troops in Afghanistan. They are based in North Waziristan but control large parts of Khost and other provinces in eastern Afghanistan as well.

The Haqqanis have also kidnapped the only known American soldier in enemy custody — PFC Bowe Bergdahl — according to a senior NATO official. Since Bergdahl was kidnapped in late June, the official says the Haqqanis “have been getting pounded” and a “great many of their mid to senior leaders have been captured and/or killed.”

The infiltration into the CIA base suggests an extremely high level of sophistication, even for a network that has a huge reach across the area.

“The Soviet Union during the Cold War, the Cubans during the Cold War were able to run double agents against the CIA very successfully,” says Clarke. “But for a non-nation state to be able to do this — for the Haqqani network of the Taliban to be able to do this — represents a huge increase in the sophistication of the enemy.”

Clarke and other former intelligence officials predict the CIA in Afghanistan will be forced to question who they can trust and change their methods in how they find informants.

The only victim of the attack who has been publicly identified is 37-year-old Harold Brown Jr., a father of three. The base chief, a woman in her 30s, was also killed, according to current and former intelligence officials. She is believed to have been focused on al Qaeda since before 9/11. A former U.S. official says a second woman was also killed in the attack, and that both women had “considerable counterintelligence experience.”

The attack also killed Captain Al Shareef Ali bin Zeid, a member of the Jordanian spy agency Dairat al-Mukhabarat al-Ammah, according to people who have spoken with bin Zeid’s family. The Jordanian military released a statement acknowledging bin Zeid had been killed in Afghanistan, but did not mention he was working with the CIA.

5:22 video

A suicide bombing assassination attempt last August on the life of the Saudi chief of Counter-terrorism Operations, Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, Debka sources reveal, was the opening move in a new al Qaeda terrorism offensive, and served as a tactical example both for the failed bombing of Flight 253 and for the successful suicide attack responsible for the deaths of seven CIA officers at Forward Operating Base Chapman on December 30th.

Debkafile:

Had the White House National Security Council, US intelligence and counter-terror agencies properly studied al Qaeda’s failed attempt to assassinate Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, deputy interior minister and commander of the Saudi anti-terror campaign in Yemen five motnhs ago, they might have detected pointers to al Qaeda’s latest terror offensive and its methods.

Like the Nigerian bomber Umar Abdulmutallab, the Saudi minister’s would-be assassin, Abdullah Hassan Tali’ al-Asiri (al Qaeda-styled Abu Khair), who did not survive the attack, used explosives hidden in his underwear to fool the prince’s bodyguards. He won an audience with the prince by posing as an informant, the same trick used by the Taliban suicide bomber to penetrate a US base and kill 7 CIA agents and a US soldier last month.

This emerging prototype was missed by US intelligence experts. …

Obama, who has called a meeting of US security agency chiefs for Tuesday, Jan. 5, cannot expect serious brainstorming because it would be inhibited by a mindset that refuses to refer to the failed mass-murderer as an illegal or enemy combatant or terrorist but only as a “suspect.” Treated like a common or garden criminal, the Nigerian has been committed to an ordinary lock-up. This has given him the opportunity to hire American lawyers, who right away shut his mouth and advised him not to cooperate in answering questions about his accessories and masters.

With this invaluable intelligence door closed, the US president has turned to measures for enhancing the security of US air travelers and air traffic bound for US ports and demanded the matching-up of the counter-terror watch and no-fly lists. Abdulmutallab appeared on the first but was left off the second as a result of the failure of US intelligence agencies to share incoming data about his record.

Furthermore, should Obama and his advisers decide on retaliation, DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources are assured by reports from Yemen that al Qaeda’s operatives were no longer hanging around their bases twelve days after the airliner episode; they had packed up and made tracks for fresh hideouts in the northern mountains and Hadhramaut.

Since Obama’s Monday, Dec. 23 pledge: “We will not rest until we find all who were involved,” the days slipping by without a US reaction have given al Qaeda the chance to plot more airliner attacks from a safe location.

The second breach in US defenses against terrorist attack has deeper roots and derives from the misconceptions about al Qaeda governing US intelligence thinking well before Barack Obama’s day in the White House.

Prince Muhammad in Nayef, Saudi Arabia’s top counter-terror executive, escaped with light injuries from Abu Khair’s attempt to kill him at his Jeddah palace on August 27, 2009, thanks mainly to the partial detonation of the explosive materials hidden in his underpants, a glitch repeated in the Nigerian bomber’s attempt.

The assassin gained entry to the most heavily fortified and guarded palace in the Red Sea town of Jeddah by convincing Saudi agents in Yemen that he was ready to switch sides – but only if he could discuss terms face to face with Prince Muhammad.

They did in fact hold several meetings – not in the palace but out in Najran province on the Yemen border. The data he handed over was solid enough to convince the Saudi prince that he was on the threshold of his government’s biggest breakthrough in its war on al Qaeda.

So when Abu Khair offered to bring with him to the Jeddah palace a list of al Qaeda high-ups in Yemen willing to defect to Saudi Arabia, the prince not only agreed to the venue but sent his private jet to pick him up from Najran.

Our counter-terror sources allow that the government in Riyadh may have kept the details of this plot from the Americans – and not for the first time. Still, CIA and FBI undercover agents in the oil kingdom could have got wind of it from their own contacts.

Had it been properly scrutinized and analyzed, there was much valuable input to be gained from the attempt on Prince Muhammad, betraying as it did Al Qaeda methods which were later replicated in the attempted bombing of the Detroit-bound airliner and, again, in the deadly attack on Dec. 30 against the CIA contingent at Forward Operation Base Chapman, in the remote Afghan Khost province.

The bomber, who has not been identified yet, not only gained entry with explosives in his possession to the well-guarded US base, but detonated the device while the agents were unarmed and working out in the base gym.

How was this accomplished? The bomber had in fact been employed as a CIA informer and was therefore known at the gate and familiar with the routines of Base Chapman. Furthermore, he knew enough to time his attack for the day of the arrival in Kabul of a high-ranking CIA official. There has been no word about this official’s fate.

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And, in Newsweek, Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball are reporting that Prince Muhammad bin Nayef briefed the White House in October about al Qaeda’s new explosive undergarments.

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan was briefed in October on an assassination attempt by Al Qaeda that investigators now believe used the same underwear bombing technique as the Nigerian suspect who tried to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day, U.S. intelligence and administration officials tell NEWSWEEK.

The briefing to Brennan was delivered at the White House by Muhammad bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia’s chief counterterrorism official. …

U.S. officials now suspect that Nayef’s attempted assassin and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian suspect aboard the Northwest flight, had the same bomb maker in Yemen.

The Telegraph reports that an attempt on the life of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard was narrowly prevented.

As usual, when innocent lives are threatened by criminal violence, police response is minutes away.

Danish police have shot a Somali man linked to al-Qaida who tried to enter the home of an artist who drew controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

The man, 28, who was armed with an axe and a knife, went to the home of Kurt Westergaard at 10pm local time on Friday, police said.

Police shot him in the leg and arm and he was arrested. The man, who is expected to recover, was later charged with two counts of attempted murder.

Mr Westergaard, 74, was commissioned by the Jyllands-Posten newspaper to produce caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed five years ago, including one which depicted the Prophet with a bomb in his turban.

He has received several death threats since the cartoon was published, but had spoken recently about trying to live as normal a life as possible at his home in Viby near the western city of Aarhus.

Mr Westergaard was there with a five-year-old granddaughter when the attacker tried to get in.

“I locked myself in our safe room. He tried to smash the entrance door with an axe,” he said.

He said that the assailant shouted “revenge” and “blood” as he tried to enter the bathroom where Mr Westergaard and the child had sought shelter.

“My grandchild did fine,” he said. “It was scary. It was close. Really close. But we did it.”

Officers arrived two minutes later and tried to arrest the assailant, who wielded an axe at a police officer. One officer then shot the man in a knee and a hand, authorities said. Nielsen said the suspect was admitted to hospital but his life was not in danger.