PARIS  The Norwegian police said Tuesday that three suspected militants arrested in July had been planning an attack on a Danish newspaper whose publication of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad in 2005 ignited fury in much of the Muslim world the following year.

The claimed link to the cartoons in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper underscored the enduring impact of the 12 drawings as a focal point of militant action. Earlier this month, Danish police said a Chechen boxer had been planning to send a letter bomb to the same newspaper when the explosives went off accidentally at a hotel in Copenhagen.

While the two cases were not believed to be directly linked, they “illustrate that there is a priority among militant Islamists to carry out acts of terror against Denmark and symbols connected” to the drawings, The Associated Press quoted Jakob Scharf, the head of Denmark police intelligence service, as saying.

On July 8, Norwegian police said they had arrested three men suspected of links to Al Qaeda who had been planning an attack, but they did not make clear what the target was