According to a story on The Globe and Mail's front page this morning, text messages sent from Europe to the Middle East  on Saturday claimed that right-wing Danish nationalists were planning to burn copies of the Koran.

Needless to say, there were no Korans burned.

The story hypothesizes that the (incorrect) news helped fan demonstrators before the torching of the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus, Syria that day.

There's also more detail on the additional cartoons.

In November and December, a group of Danish Muslims travelled through the Middle East to tell fellow Muslims of the cartoons and call for protest.

The group carried even more offensive cartoons of the Prophet that had been sent to them by private citizens in Denmark.

According to Jyllands-Posten, the imams from the organization Islamisk Trossamfund took three other unsourced drawings as well, showing Mohammed with the face of a pig, a dog sodomizing a praying Muslim and Mohammed as a pedophile.

Anger festered and boiled at the annual Hajj in Saudi Arabia, and was kept alive through blogs and other electronic forums.

Last week, the diplomatic protests began.

The paper at the centre of the row also said it was sorry. In an open letter posted on its website in English and Arabic, it recognized that it had "indisputably offended many Muslims." ...

Outraged by what they regarded as Denmark's "caving in," several right-wing European newspapers decided to demonstrate solidarity.

On Wednesday, France's Le Soir republished the caricatures under the defiant headline "Yes, We have the right to caricature God" -- a gesture that led to the sacking of the paper's editor the next day.

Separately, Germany's Die Welt slapped the turban-bomb Mohammed cartoon on its front page.

Other newspapers in Italy, Spain and Switzerland followed suit.