Shooting at Copenhagen event attended by controversial Swedish artist Lars Vilks

UPDATE: 2.25pm.

UPDATE: 12pm.

One person was shot in the head and two police were wounded in an attack on a synagogue in central Copenhagen, Danish police said, adding that it was too early to say whether the incident was connected to an earlier attack on a cafe at a cultural centre.

Danish television station TV2 said a large metro and train station nearby, Norreport, was being evacuated.

The news followed a shooting attack earlier on Saturday at a cafe which hosted a debate on freedom of speech and was attended by Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who has been threatened with death for his cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. One man died in that attack, and police said a suspect was still at large.

A gunman on Saturday fired shots into a Copenhagen cafe that was hosting a public event on freedom of speech, featuring a Swedish artist who had received death threats for a 2007 cartoon he drew caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad. The Danish police said that one man, age 40, had been killed and three police officers wounded but that the gunman had been unable to enter the Krudttoenden cafe.

The Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, said on Saturday that the shooting had been a terrorist attack and that the nation was on high alert.

The artist, Lars Vilks, 68, was unharmed, and police said there had been only one gunman, after initially reporting that there were two. The gunman, wearing a black parka and a maroon balaclava over his head, fled in a dark Volkswagen Polo, which was later found empty. The French ambassador to Denmark, who was at the event, wrote on Twitter that he was also unharmed.

The gunfire at the event, "Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression," followed the killings last month in Paris at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical newspaper that had reprinted Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad.

Like Vilks, the editor of Charlie Hebdo - Stephane Charbonnier, who was killed - had been on a list of assassination targets issued by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and other radical Muslim groups. Other figures, like the novelist Salman Rushdie, are still considered targets and are under death threats from radical Islamists. The list includes three staff members of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which printed Muhammad cartoons in 2005: Kurt Westergaard, Carsten Juste and Flemming Rose.

Vilks has had regular protection from the Swedish police after death threats and at least one previous attempt on his life. On Saturday, the Danish police were also protecting the cafe. The gunman, who fired at least 30 rounds into the windows and doors, was unable to force his way inside.

Helle Merete Brix, one of the organisers of the event, said she believed Vilks was the intended target. She said she moved with Vilks into a cold storage room, as some French survivors did in a subsequent attack in Paris on a kosher grocery.

"I was in a cold room and kept hold of Lars Vilks' hand," she told Danish TV2 television. "He was very cool. We stood and told each other bad jokes."

Brix said Vilks' bodyguards "did a tremendous job," and added, "It is a dramatic and unpleasant reminder of what we are up against in these times."

Remarkably, she said, the seminar continued after the shooting.

Niels Ivar Larsen, one of the speakers at the event, said: "I heard someone firing with an automatic weapon and someone shouting. Police returned the fire, and I hid behind the bar. I felt surreal, like in a movie."

The French ambassador, Francois Zimeray, was not hurt. "They fired on us from the outside," he told the French news agency Agence France-Presse. "It was the same intention as Charlie Hebdo, except they didn't manage to get in."

The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, called the shooting a terrorist attack, and France's president, Francois Hollande, said he would send the interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, to consult with the Danes. The Danish police said they were investigating the attack as a possible act of terrorism.

Inna Shevchenko, an activist with Femen, a feminist group known for its bare-breasted protests, was also in the cafe. She said on Twitter that she was safe and at a police station.

Vilks, who in 2007 portrayed Muhammad as a dog on a traffic circle in a cartoon in a Swedish newspaper, said that he was under constant threat and that the Swedish police had increased their protection of him after the Charlie Hebdo killings. He told The Wall Street Journal last month that he had to coordinate his outings with the police because he "can't go anywhere without a police escort."

He said artists and satirists should not tread more carefully in their criticism of Islam than they would with any other religion.

"Almost the entire Muslim world is subject to a theological rule that has a strange outcome when it comes to human rights," he said. "You can't ignore that. Then you're talking tactics, how should one go about to change that. Some say you should be very careful, but that's just postponing the problem. Sooner or later, you have to explain what you're criticizing."

He is under 24-hour police watch, he said.

"Police protection doesn't offer a 100 per cent guarantee, as we saw with Charlie Hebdo, but it goes pretty far," he said. "I don't have to lie awake at night listening for odd sounds."

Vilks is also known as a conceptual sculptor and something of a provocateur, building sculptures in protected nature reserves in Sweden. He originally did his Muhammad drawings for a local art exhibit, which withdrew them, fearing protests.

Other Swedish galleries also declined to show the drawings, but in August 2007, a regional newspaper, Nerikes Allehanda, published one of them to illustrate an editorial on self-censorship and freedom of religion. Protests and death threats ensued.

In 2010, the police discovered plots against Vilks' life, and he was assaulted that year while giving a lecture on free speech at Uppsala University. Last year, a Pennsylvania woman was sentenced to a 10-year prison term for a plot to kill him, and in 2010, two brothers were jailed after they tried to burn down his house.

 - The New York Times