Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, centre, is escorted out of his home by Los Angeles County Sheriff's officers in Cerritos, Calif., in this file photo taken Sept. 15, 2012.Bret Hartman/Reuters
The convicted fraudster behind an online video that outraged Muslims with its portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed as a thuggish deviant says he has no regrets, the New York Times reported Monday.
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula's crude trailer for Innocence of Muslims first appeared on YouTube in July, and touched off protests across the Muslim world in September.
Mr. Nakoula, convicted of bank fraud in 2010, was later arrested in Los Angeles for violating the terms of his release on probation, for which he now is serving a one-year prison sentence.
In what the Times called his first public remarks since his return to jail, Mr. Nakoula stated he would go to great lengths to convey what he called "the actual truth" about Mohammed.
"I thought, before I wrote this script, that I should burn myself in a public square to let the American people and the people of the world know this message that I believe in," he said in reply to written questions.
He cited the killing of 13 people at the Fort Hood military base in Texas in November, 2009 – for which a Muslim army psychiatrist has been charged – as evidence of "atrocities" carried out "under the sign of Allah."
"I became even more upset and enraged" after the Fort Hood massacre, said Mr. Nakoula, 55, a Coptic Christian immigrant from Egypt.
The Innocence of Muslim trailer was initially blamed for stirring the September attack in Benghazi in which U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed. The Obama administration later attributed the incident to terrorism.
The trailer was 14 minutes long, but the Times said it had confirmed the existence of a full-length version with people who had seen it on DVD. It runs for one hour and 40 minutes.
"My dad is not an evil man," the Times quoted his son, Abanob Nakoula, as saying.
"He has had a hard life. He did something – the movie, something he felt strongly about – that was not frowned upon by the [U.S.] constitution. He would always say, 'Don't fight Muslims; fight their ideology.'"