The offer, which made the front pages of Indian newspapers Saturday, was made by Mohammed Yaqoob Qureshi, a minister in the northern Uttar Pradesh state government, at a Muslim rally after Friday prayers.

Yaqoob told the crowd in Meerut, 400 kilometers (250 miles) northwest of the state capital Lucknow, that he would give “the avenger” 510 million rupees (11.5 million dollars) and his weight in gold.

“Drawing a cartoon of the Prophet is blasphemous and Muslims will not tolerate this insult,” he said in speech as demonstrators cried, “Death to France, Death to Denmark”.

“The money will be paid by the people of Meerut,” said Yaqoob, who is the state’s minister in charge of minority affairs and the annual Hajj pilgrimage, which Muslims undertake to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

The government of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and which has a large Muslim community, said the minister’s statements were “his personal wish” and did not violate government rules.

“The announcement has been made taking into account the feelings of the people,” home secretary Alok Sinha told reporters. “There is no offence to make such an announcement about a person living in a distant foreign country.

But the influential All-Muslim Personal Law Board Muslims, an authoritative national body of Muslim clerics, slammed the reward as ”anti-Islamic and anti-humanity,” the Indian Express newspaper reported.

Yaqoob’s reward offer received wide coverage in Indian newspapers on Saturday.

“510 million rupees for cartoonist’s head -- Uttar Pradesh mininister announces bounty, government says it’s ok,” the Hindustan Times said in a headline.

Yaqoob reiterated his offer on Saturday.

“The Muslim community will give a reward ... to anyone who beheads the cartoonist,” he told AFP by telephone from Meerut.

The cartoons, drawn by 12 artists, were first published in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September and later reprinted in a number of other mainly European dailies. They have sparked Muslim protests worldwide.

The minister did not specify any particular artist in his threat.

Yaqoob’s declaration on Friday came on the same day as a cleric in Pakistan offered a one-million-dollar reward and a car for killing any of the cartoonists responsible for the drawings, one of which portrayed the prophet with a bomb in his turban

Islamic teachings prohibits any depiction of the prophet.

Muslims make up around 130 million of mainly Hindu India’s billion-plus population. While there have been large demonstrations against the cartoons in India they have been mainly peaceful.