MOSCOW, February 15 (RIA Novosti) - The Russian Prosecutor General's Office has launched a probe into the publication of a religious cartoon in a Volga-region newspaper, a spokesman said Wednesday.
The cartoon, published in Volgograd newspaper Gorodskiye Izvestia depicts Jesus Christ, the Prophet Mohammed, Moses and Buddha looking at two groups of people ready to fight on a TV screen. The caption under the cartoon reads, "We did not teach them to do that..."
With violent protests against caricatures of Mohammed in a Danish paper continuing to sweep parts of the Muslim world, representatives of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party and some public organizations asked prosecutors to investigate the Russian cartoon publication, claiming that it insulted the feelings of believers.
Deputy Prosecutor of the Volgograd Region Alexander Rusyayev said religious experts would consider the publication and after that prosecutors would make their conclusions.
Prosecutor Leonid Belyak said in a letter to the newspaper's editor, "Given the realities of the complicated inter-religious situation in the world and Russia, publications of such cartoons may provoke an inappropriate reaction from believers, may give extremist forces cause to incite religious discord and have very negative consequences."
A spokeswoman for the prosecutor said the office did not have any claims against the contents of the piece but warned journalists about the danger of drawing cartoons of religious figures.
Meanwhile, Gorodskiye Izvestia Editor Tatyana Kaminskaya said she had received no complaints from religious or ethnic communities, and added that the article protested against religious and inter-ethnic intolerance.
"I can't understand why anyone could come to such conclusions," she said. "The piece is against religious and inter-ethnic intolerance. A caricature is comical but somehow with a malicious depiction of reality. There was nothing of the sort in our newspaper."
Similar arguments were used by Western journalists who published satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Danish and other media.
A wave of protests engulfed the Muslim world after these publications as depictions of Mohammed are explicitly prohibited by Islamic law. Muslims of many countries took to the streets in protest against the publications, which led to ransacking the embassies of Denmark and some other Western countries and mass disturbances. Attacks on Danish and Norwegian peacekeepers took place in Afghanistan.
As many as 17 Arab countries have declared a boycott of Danish goods, and tension is growing in relations between a number of Islamic states and countries whose media reprinted the controversial caricatures. Egypt has suspended deals with the currencies of Denmark and Norway.
