Vologda, February 20, Interfax - A newspaper in Vologda was shut down by its owners after it reprinted the Danish cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad, Mikhail Smirnov, the owner of the Severinform information holding to which the newspaper belongs, told the press.
"The decision to close down the newspaper was made in order to ward off attacks on anyone in the editorial team," Smirnov said.
"It is a sacrifice we have made to remove any pretext for speculation about inciting hatred," he said.
The newspaper's editor-in-chief Anna Smirnova had earlier testified at the regional prosecutor's office under a probe into the cartoon publication.
On February 15, the newspaper, Nash Region, published an article entitled "A War of Caricatures: Opinions" and supplemented it with the caricatures.
Smirnova told Interfax that all quotations and the caricatures themselves had been taken from official Russian web-sites, while the commentaries were published unedited and all references to the original were provided. The most offensive caricatures were only printed in part.
Vologda Region Governor Vyacheslav Pozgalyov has apologized to the Muslims for the local newspaper's publication.
The Nash Region newspaper was Russia's second publication to reprint the caricatures. Earlier, the newspaper Gorodskiye vesti, Volgograd, had published a drawing depicting Christ, Moses, Buddha and Muhammad accompanying an article entitled "Racists Must be Barred from Power."
The United Russia party's Volgograd branch deemed the picture to be religiously offensive, while Volgograd Vice Mayor Andrey Doronin announced that the Gorodskiye vesti would be liquidated.
Russian politicians, rights organizations and religious figures disapproved of the Volgograd authorities' decision to close the newspaper down.
