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

In Oslo, Siv Alsen, a spokeswoman for the security service of the Norwegian police, said the plan to attack a Danish newspaper had emerged from questioning of one of the suspects, a 37-year-old Iraqi Kurd identified as Shawan Sadek Saeed Bujak Bujak. The information he provided showed that the three men had been planning an attack against Jyllands-Posten, Ms. Alsen said in a telephone interview.

The three suspects, one an Iraqi Kurd, one a Uighur from China who had become a Norwegian citizen and one from Uzbekistan, had all arrived in Norway seeking asylum between 1999 and 2002 and had permanent residency rights, she said. Ms. Alsen declined to give details of the nature of the plot. She said investigators had not established a link with Al Qaeda. Details of the inquiry so far had emerged from a leak to a Norwegian newspaper, she said.

After the cartoons were published in late 2005, protests and violence spread into 2006 in many parts of the Muslim from Afghanistan and Indonesia, through the Middle East to Nigeria. The conflict sharpened as other European newspapers, including some in France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Spain and Hungary, reprinted the cartoons.

The drawings included one of which depicted the prophet wearing a turban with a ticking bomb nestled in it. Images of Muhammad are regarded as blasphemous by many Muslims.