He worked from the 1980s until his 75th birthday as an illustrator and cartoonist at Jyllands-Posten and it was there that a dozen of his Muhammad drawings were published in 2005.
The most controversial image of the Prophet with a bomb in the turban provoked a wave of protests among Muslims around the world.
Westergaard has since lived under death threats and and several assassination attempts against him have over the years been revealed by the Danish security police.
Did not regret the publication
In an interview with AFP ten years after the publication, Westergaard said that he does not regret it in any way, but says that what happened probably could not have been avoided anyway.
- Now it happened to be cartoons that started this conflict, but it could just as easily have been a play, a book, or something else, he said then.