Seven people, reportedly including a Croatian national, have been arrested in the Irish Republic over an alleged plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist for depicting the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog, the British newspaper The Times reported on Wednesday.
Irish anti-terrorist units used information from the CIA, FBI and European intelligence agencies to identify the reported terrorist cell of three women and four men.
They are believed to include Algerian, Libyan, Croatian, US and Palestinian citizens and at least one naturalised Irish citizen.
Ireland's RTE news network previously reported that the people in custody were originally refugees from Morocco and Yemen, but had gained asylum and were in the Republic of Ireland legally.
They were arrested in Cork and Waterford after a four-month international investigation.
Al-Qaeda offered a $100,000 reward for killing cartoonist Lars Vilks, who has been in hiding since he received death threats this year.
Vilks published the controversial cartoon in a paper of Oerebro, a town west of Stockholm, in 2007.
After the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard was threatened by a Somali axeman in January, Vilks said he had received calls from "a Swedish-speaking Somali" who said: "Now it's your turn," The Times reported.
