“May” was watching a television documentary about young Europeans recruited by Isis to fight in Syria when there was a knock on her cottage door. Two policemen in civilian clothes were standing outside.
“I knew immediately it must be something about Lars,” she said. The Swedish artist Lars Vilks had been living under police protection since he sketched a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad in 2007, leading al-Qaeda in Iraq to put a $150,000 bounty on his head. “Is Lars dead?” asked his partner of 30 years.
Vilks had been killed in a freakish motorway incident, the officers said. The artist and two bodyguards were travelling in an unmarked, bulletproof car that collided with a truck and burst into a fireball from which none of