Denmark investigates claim that Danes fighting alongside insurgents in Iraq

Denmark will investigate claims that one or several people with Danish passports are fighting alongside insurgents in Iraq, the government said Tuesday.

Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said he had asked the Danish Embassy in Baghdad to contact the Iraqi government about the claims made in a London-based newspaper.

The London-based pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat quoted Iraq's Interior Minister Bayan Jabr as saying that terrorists from Denmark, France and Italy are in Iraq. Denmark has some 500 troops in southern Iraq, the AP reports.

Lars Findsen, the head of the Danish Security Intelligence Service, said in November 2003 that some European Muslims, angered by the U.S. occupation of Iraq, were heading there to join the anti-American resistance. Findsen declined to give specifics, exact numbers or say whether a recruitment network was in place. A.M.