A German national was briefly held by Palestinian gunmen in the occupied West Bank today after militants threatened Europeans over newspaper caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad.
"Yes, I am OK," Christoph Kasten, a 21-year-old German national who teaches English in the West Bank city of Nablus, told reporters in the offices of the Palestinian Preventive Security agency.
"Two Palestinian gunmen asked me to go with them. I didn't know where. They did not make any demands. After a while, they put me in a taxi and told me the taxi would take me to the police," he said.
Kasten was kidnapped from a hotel coffee shop, where he had been sitting with two Palestinian colleagues.
Earlier, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed faction in President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement, threatened in a news conference to kidnap citizens of France, Denmark and Norway if they did not leave Nablus within 72 hours.
Palestinian security officials said gunmen from another armed group in Fatah seized Kasten in protest at the cartoons, which were published in a Danish newspaper in September and republished in Norway last month.
Newspapers in France, Germany and Spain have also reprinted the caricatures. Islamic tradition prohibits realistic depictions of prophets, and considers caricatures of them blasphemous.