Vienna: Belarus court sentenced a newspaper editor on Friday to three years in prison for reprinting a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked worldwide riots when it was initially published in a Danish newspaper.
In Vienna, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe protested the sentence and called for the release of Alexander Sdvizhkov, the former deputy editor of the small-circulation Zhoda newspaper.
Security officers in Belarus launched an investigation of Sdvizhkov in February 2006 when he published the caricatures which had originally appeared in the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten.
Fiery protests swept across Muslim countries in early 2006 in reaction to the Danish publication.
President Alexander Lukashenko ordered the paper shut the following month, calling the publication of the cartoon "a provocation against the state." Sdvizhkov was arrested and charged with "inciting religious hatred" in November 2007 when he returned to Belarus following several months of living in Russia and Ukraine.
The Minsk City Court imposed its sentence Friday after a closed-door trial. Sdvizhkov said he would appeal.
Belarusian Islamic leader Ismail Voronovich called the sentence excessively harsh.
The ex-Soviet republic is overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian; less than 1 per cent of the country's 10 million is Muslim.
In the 14 years he has been in power, Lukashenko has run the country with an iron fist, quashing opposition groups, closing down independent media and restoring Soviet-style, central controls to the economy.
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