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Police Say They Killed Suspect in 2 Attacks in Copenhagen Terror Attacks By a Native Son Rock Denmark
(about 7 hours later)
LONDON — The Copenhagen police said on Sunday that they had shot and killed a man they believed carried out two attacks that left two people dead, one at a cafe and one outside a synagogue, and wounded at least five policemen. COPENHAGEN — After killing a Danish film director in a Saturday afternoon attack on a Copenhagen cafe and then a Jewish night guard at a synagogue, the 22-year-old gunman responsible for Denmark’s worst burst of terrorism in decades unleashed a final fusillade outside a four-story apartment building before dawn on Sunday.
The police have identified the suspect as a 22-year-old native of Denmark who was already known to security services as a gang member with a violent criminal record, but they did not name him. Cornered by the police in a narrow street near the railway station in Norrebro, a heavily immigrant, shabby-chic district of Denmark’s capital, the Danish-born attacker opened fire and was killed in a burst of return fire, the police said.
The dual attacks in Copenhagen had a copycat resemblance to last month’s attacks in Paris, in which jihadist gunmen killed cartoonists at the newspaper Charlie Hebdo and followed with gunshots aimed at a Jewish target. But the police said there was no immediate indication that he had any link to jihadist groups. His body fell face up on the sidewalk, said Soren Krebs, 22, an economics student who lives in the adjacent building, and it left a pool of blood that was hosed away Sunday afternoon by the fire department.
The first attack took place on Saturday, when a gunman sprayed bullets into the cafe where a Swedish cartoonist who had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad was speaking. That attack killed one man, who was identified on Sunday by the Danish media as Finn Norgaard, 55, a film director. Hours later, early Sunday, a man was shot and killed outside the city’s main synagogue, according to the police. “My first feeling was just panic,” Mr. Krebs recalled, adding that he initially thought the gunfire was a battle between drug dealers. In Denmark, he said, “the first thing that comes to mind is not terrorism. This is not a problem we have had to think about much.”
Dan Rosenberg Asmussen, a leader of Denmark’s Jewish community, said that the victim at the synagogue was a young Jewish man who was guarding the entrance of a building adjacent to the synagogue. He said that some 80 people were inside the synagogue at the time, celebrating a bat mitzvah, and that the police had been asked to provide protection after the cafe shooting. Denmark’s chief rabbi, Jair Melchior, identified the Jewish victim as Dan Uzan, 37, a longtime security guard. After a January rampage in the Paris area that killed 17 people, and police raids in Belgium a week later that the authorities said thwarted a major terrorist operation, Denmark became over the weekend the latest European country plunged into what Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt described Sunday as “a fight for freedom against a dark ideology.”
“Denmark has been hit by terror,” the Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, said on Sunday. “We do not know the motive for the alleged perpetrator’s actions, but we know that there are forces that want to hurt Denmark. They want to rebuke our freedom of speech.” She added: “This is not a war between Islam and the West.” Though the gunman’s name and basic biographical details were still unclear late Sunday, he appears to have shared some traits with at least two of the militants responsible for the Paris violence, notably a criminal record and an abrupt transition from street crime to Islamic militancy.
She later visited the Copenhagen synagogue and said: “The Jewish community is a large and integrated part of Danish society,” adding, “Together we will shield Denmark from the kind of attack we saw last night.” The Danish news media identified him as Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, but the Copenhagen police did not confirm his name. They identified him only as a 22-year-old, born and raised in Denmark, whom they knew for gang-related activity and for several criminal offenses linked to weapons violations and violence.
Jorgen Skov, a police inspector, said at a news conference on Sunday in Copenhagen that the police had shot and killed the suspect after he opened fire on officers in the Norrebro neighborhood. The shooter was confronted by the police as he returned to an address that they were keeping under surveillance, Mr. Skov said. The police suspected that the man had been involved in the killings, in part because of information from video surveillance and from a taxi driver who had picked up the suspect. When the suspect returned to his address at 4:50 a.m., the police said, he responded to their shouts with gunfire and was killed. A Copenhagen police statement issued in November 2013 asked for help in finding a suspect by the same name who was wanted at the time in connection with a stabbing on a commuter train. The police noted then that the suspect “should be considered dangerous.”
Torben Moelgaard Jensen, a senior police official, said: “We believe the same man was behind both shootings, and we also believe that the perpetrator who was shot by the police action force at Norrebro station is the person behind the two attacks.” The police have no indication for the moment that other suspects were involved, he said. This weekend Ms. Thorning-Schmidt warned the usually placid nation — whose 5.6 million citizens regularly rank in opinion surveys as among the world’s happiest people — that “if a madman is willing to sacrifice his life, then we will never be able to guard ourselves 100 percent.”
Later Sunday, there were reports that the police had raided an Internet cafe in connection with the case. A police spokesman, Steen Hansen, confirmed that there had been such a raid, but said it was one of many searches across the city, and he would give no further details. Heavily armed police officers were out in force across Copenhagen, the Danish capital, on Sunday. Though the authorities said the gunman appeared to be acting alone, police officers raided a number of homes and other places, including an Internet cafe. The local news media reported that at least two people had been detained, but a police spokesman, Soren Hansen, said he could not confirm any arrests.
It was a dramatic day in Copenhagen, with 30 shots fired Saturday afternoon into a cafe at a public seminar on “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression,” intended to discuss the January attack in Paris on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical newspaper that had reprinted Danish cartoons of Muhammad. The event featured a Swedish cartoonist, Lars Vilks, 68, who had drawn a cartoon in 2007 of Muhammad as a dog at a traffic circle and was on a “death list” drawn up by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as was the murdered editor of Charlie Hebdo, Stéphane Charbonnier. In the Norrebro district, a search of the gunman’s apartment uncovered an automatic weapon, the spokesman said. The attacker was carrying two guns — including the weapon apparently used to kill the director and the Jewish security guard — when he was shot early Sunday outside the window of Mr. Krebs, the student.
In addition to the killing of the film director in the cafe attack, three police officers were wounded. Mr. Vilks, who is under 24-hour police guard, was well-protected by both the Swedish and Danish police who prevented the gunman, who had shot up the front of the cafe, from entering it. The man escaped in a small Volkswagen, later abandoned, and hours later, just after midnight, the Jewish man was shot in the head and killed in central Copenhagen, near the synagogue. Two more police officers were wounded and again the gunman escaped, this time on foot. Awakened by a burst of gunfire shortly after 5 a.m., Mr. Krebs said, he looked out of his ground-floor bedroom to witness a shootout “like in a movie” and then crawled next door to the room of a fellow student, Casper Dam, who had been out late drinking and was asleep. The two terrified men took refuge in a bathroom away from the street.
The center of Copenhagen was shut down, and the police told residents to stay inside as they conducted their manhunt in the trendy Norrebro neighborhood. Jens Madsen, the chief of Denmark’s domestic security agency, known as P.E.T., said there was no indication the gunman had traveled to Syria or Iraq as a jihadist fighter or had any connection to the two French-born brothers who attacked the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7 or a third Frenchman who, two days later, seized a Paris kosher supermarket and killed shoppers there.
The latest violence comes as Europe is increasingly on edge after the January attacks in Paris, when 17 people died, representing the worst spasm of terrorism in France in decades. Anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment is rising in Europe, as are incidents of anti-Semitism. But Mr. Madsen, speaking to reporters at Copenhagen’s Police Headquarters on Sunday, said it was possible that the city’s attacks had been “inspired” by the Paris bloodshed.
European governments, like Denmark's, are also trying to understand and stop young Muslims from traveling to Syria and Iraq to fight as jihadists. At least 5,000 Europeans are estimated to have already done so — at least 100 of them Danish — and there are fears that some of those fighters will return home to commit domestic terrorism. While most Danes responded with shock to the weekend shootings, the country’s security services have been on alert against Islamic extremism since 2005, when the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad and, several months later, a Copenhagen mosque sent a mission to the Middle East to rally hostility against Denmark. Danish diplomatic missions were attacked and Danish businesses boycotted across the Muslim world.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, denounced the attack and said that his government encouraged a “massive immigration” of Jews from Europe. “This wave of attacks is expected to continue, as well as murderous anti-Semitic attacks,” said Mr. Netanyahu, who is in the middle of a tight election campaign. “Jews deserve security in every country, but we say to our Jewish brothers and sisters, Israel is your home.” In an editorial to be published Monday, Jyllands Posten said, “Unfortunately, it is difficult to claim surprise at the attacks in Copenhagen.” Terrorism, it added, was “not a question of if, but when.”
Rabbi Melchior responded that he was “disappointed” by Mr. Netanyahu’s comments, saying: “Terror is not a reason to move to Israel.” Kurt Westergaard, who drew a cartoon for the newspaper that showed Muhammad with a bomb in a black turban, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in 2010, fleeing into a safe room at his home in the port city of Aarhus to escape a young Somali armed with an ax and a knife.
Jewish organizations called for more protection for Europe’s Jews. Rabbi Menachem Margolin, general director of the European Jewish Association, accused European Union leaders Sunday of not doing enough to combat what he called “rampant anti-Semitism.” In 2013, Lars Hedegaard, an outspoken critic of Islam and a defender of Lars Vilks, the Swedish cartoonist who appeared to have been targeted at the cafe, was shot at outside his Copenhagen home by a gunman disguised as a postal worker.
Ms. Thorning-Schmidt, the prime minister, had on Saturday called the shooting at the Krudttonden cafe a terrorist attack and said that the nation was on high alert. “We feel certain now that it was a politically motivated attack, and thereby it was a terrorist attack,” she said. The weekend violence, however, still represented the worst terrorism to hit Denmark since the 1980s, when left-wing extremists killed a police officer in the capital and still-unidentified extremists planted bombs near a Copenhagen synagogue and the offices of an American airline.
The Swedish cartoonist, Mr. Vilks, was unharmed in the attack but said that he thought he was the target. “What other motive could there be?” he told The Associated Press. In its response to the threat since the cartoon crisis, the authorities have combined extensive surveillance of suspected militants and of radical mosques with efforts to “rehabilitate,” rather than punish, young Muslims who dabble in extremism but have not yet been implicated in criminal actions. While most European governments have sought to arrest or expel residents who have returned home after waging jihad in Syria and Iraq, for example, the city of Aarhus has set up a counseling program to help them reintegrate into society.
The French ambassador to Denmark, who had been at the event, wrote on Twitter that he also was not hurt, as did Inna Shevchenko, the leader of Femen, the feminist group known for its bare-breasted protest demonstrations. The ambassador, François Zimeray, told Agence France-Presse: “They fired on us from the outside. It was the same intention as Charlie Hebdo, except they didn’t manage to get in.” Like the Paris gunmen, the 22-year-old responsible for the weekend’s killings in Copenhagen was born in the country he sought to terrorize, into a Muslim immigrant family. He had a criminal record, and Danish TV2 television said he had been released from prison just weeks earlier.
Helle Merete Brix, one of the organizers of the event, said she believed Mr. Vilks had been the intended target. During the shooting, she said, she moved with Mr. Vilks into a cold storage room, as some French survivors did during the siege of a kosher market in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo attack. “I was in a cold room and kept hold of Lars Vilks’s hand,” she told Denmark’s TV2. “He was very cool. We stood and told each other bad jokes.” His first attack took place Saturday afternoon when he sprayed bullets into the cafe where Mr. Vilks, who had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad, was speaking. That attack killed one man, identified by the Danish media as Finn Norgaard, 55, a film director. Three police officers were wounded. Mr. Vilks, who was attending a meeting on freedom of speech, was not hurt.
Ms. Brix said Mr. Vilks’s bodyguards had done “a tremendous job” and added, “It is a dramatic and unpleasant reminder of what we are up against in these times.” The gunman then fled by car, and the vehicle was later found abandoned. Video footage from surveillance cameras showed the suspect talking into a cellphone, apparently to order a taxi. He then took a cab to Mjolnerparken, an area of Norrebro, where surveillance cameras caught him entering a housing compound and leaving 20 minutes later.
Remarkably, she said, the seminar continued after the shooting. He then reappeared, according to the police, shortly before 1 a.m. Sunday at a synagogue in the center of the city, opening fire on the police and security guards, one of whom was killed.
Niels Ivar Larsen, one of the speakers at the event, said: “I heard someone firing with an automatic weapon and someone shouting. Police returned the fire, and I hid behind the bar. I felt surreal, like in a movie.” Dan Rosenberg Asmussen, a leader of Denmark’s Jewish community, said that the victim at the synagogue was a young Jewish man who was guarding a building adjacent to the synagogue. He said that about 80 people were inside the synagogue at the time celebrating a bat mitzvah, and that the police had been asked to provide protection after the cafe shooting. Denmark’s chief rabbi, Jair Melchior, identified the victim as Dan Uzan, 37, a longtime security guard.
The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, called the shooting a terrorist attack, and President François Hollande said he would send the French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, to consult with the Danes. Soren Esperson, deputy chairman of the Danish People’s Party, a right-wing populist party, said the attack “looks very much like a copycat action.”
The president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, called the attack at the cafe “another brutal terrorist attack targeted at our fundamental values and freedoms, including the freedom of expression.” He said, “It has the same targets as in Paris: a cartoonist, Jews and the police.” A loud critic of immigration, his party has surged in recent years.
The Charlie Hebdo columnist Patrick Pelloux said late on Saturday: “We are all Danish tonight.” Mr. Esperson derided pleas from leading mainstream politicians, including the prime minister, that Islam not be blamed for the violence. “Of course this has something to do with Islam just as the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades and witch burning had something to do with Christianity,” he said. Christianity, he added, had “dealt with its fanatics,” and Islam “must now do the same.”
Mr. Vilks said that he was under constant threat and that the Swedish police had increased their protection of him after the Charlie Hebdo killings. He told The Wall Street Journal last month that he had to coordinate his outings with the police because he “can’t go anywhere without a police escort.” Muslim organizations in Denmark condemned the attacks. The Islamic Religious Community, an umbrella organization, denounced what it called a “wrong action” and also called on the Danish authorities to “show their solidarity with all, including Muslims, who will undoubtedly be the next victims in daily life.”
He said artists and satirists should not tread more carefully in their criticism of Islam than they would in criticizing any other religion. “Almost the entire Muslim world is subject to a theological rule that has a strange outcome when it comes to human rights,” he said. “You can’t ignore that. Then you’re talking tactics, how should one go about to change that. Some say you should be very careful, but that’s just postponing the problem. Sooner or later, you have to explain what you’re criticizing.” Meanwhile, the authorities and residents in the neighborhood where the gunman lived are scrambling to learn how a common criminal seemingly turned into a violent zealot.
Mr. Vilks is also known as a conceptual sculptor and something of a provocateur, building sculptures in nature reserves in Sweden. He originally drew his Muhammad cartoons for a local art exhibition, which withdrew them, fearing protests. Other Swedish galleries also declined to show the drawings, but in August 2007, a regional newspaper, Nerikes Allehanda, published one of them to illustrate an editorial on self-censorship and freedom of religion. Protests and death threats ensued. Mohammud Awil, who has lived in Mjolnerparken since emigrating from Somalia 26 years ago, blamed extremist self-declared preachers who “pick on young people who drink or use drugs because they are very weak.” Mr. Awil, a bus driver, said he knew several families whose Danish-born children had gone to fight in Somalia or the Middle East. “They get brainwashed,” he said.
In 2010, the police discovered plots against Mr. Vilks’s life, and he was assaulted while giving a lecture on free speech at Uppsala University in Sweden. Last year, a Pennsylvania woman was sentenced to a 10-year prison term for a plot to kill him, and in 2010, two brothers were jailed after trying to burn down his house. Ms. Thorning-Schmidt sought to calm tensions after the attacks, saying, “This is not a war between Islam and the West.”