The offices of a French satirical newspaper that "invited" the Prophet Muhammad as a guest editor, has been seriously damaged after it was petrol bombed.
The front-page of the Charlie Hebdo weekly showed a cartoon-like man with a turban, white robe and beard smiling broadly and saying, in an accompanying bubble "100 lashes if you don't die laughing".
A police official confirmed the fire broke out overnight at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, but the cause remains unclear. No injuries were reported.
The director and editor-in-chief of the newspaper, who uses the name Charb, said a Molotov cocktail was thrown inside through a broken window and the fire spread through the building.
"Luckily the firemen intervened in time before the whole building was burned," Charb said.
The magazine denied it was trying to be provocative.
"What has motivated us to publish this number were the events in Libya and Tunisia," said Charb. "It was a joke where the topic was to imagine a world where Sharia would be applied, but as everyone tells us not to worry either about Libya or Tunisia, we wanted to explain what would be a soft version of Sharia, a Sharia applied in a soft manner."
Newspaper employees said they had received numerous threats as a result of the issue, subtitled "Sharia Hebdo", in reference to Islamic law.
