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2 Men Suspected of Helping Copenhagen Gunman Are Arrested Anger of Suspect in Danish Killings Is Seen as Only Loosely Tied to Islam
(about 9 hours later)
COPENHAGEN — Two men suspected of helping the 22-year-old gunman responsible for killing a documentary filmmaker and a guard in Copenhagen in a rare instance of terrorism have been arrested, the Danish police said on Monday. COPENHAGEN — When Aydin Soei, a sociologist in Denmark, met members of an inner-city gang in 2008, one teenage tough stood out as more intelligent than his peers, and more mercurial. He showed little interest in Islam, but a deep loathing for Denmark, the country where he was born and spent his entire life.
The two men, who were not identified, were detained on Sunday in raids in Norrebro, the neighborhood where the gunman was killed by officers as he opened fire. A judge ruled later Monday that they were to remain in custody for 10 days, pending the outcome of an investigation on suspicion of assisting the gunman. On Sunday, that former gang member, Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, died in a gun battle with Danish police officers just a few hundred yards from his boyhood home in Norrebro, an immigrant area of the Danish capital. It was the final, bloody episode of a short and angry life that included petty crime and macho violence and ended with a 15-hour explosion of militancy on the streets of Copenhagen.
The two men were believed to have helped shelter the gunmen and to have disposed of a weapon, the Danish authorities said. Thousands of Danes bearing lighted torches and flags braved icy wind to gather for a mass memorial Monday evening in the Copenhagen neighborhood where the gunman sprayed a cafe with bullets Saturday afternoon. The cafe, whose name translates as “the powder keg,” was hosting a discussion about free speech at the time of the attack.
The authorities had previously said the gunman appeared to have operated on his own, and Denmark’s prime minister said Monday that there was no evidence of a wider plot. As the authorities across Europe try to figure out how radical Islam turns a tiny but dangerous minority of young Muslims into terrorists, Mr. Soei, the sociologist, said that Mr. Hussein, 22, was an exemplar of a phenomenon of Europe’s urban neighborhoods, not a product of the teachings of the Quran or their distortions by militant preachers.
“We have no indication at this stage that he was part of a cell,” Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said. “But we will of course in the coming time evaluate our fight against radicalization. We are already doing a lot.” “This wasn’t an intellectual Islamist with a long beard,” Mr. Soei said. “This was a loser man from the ghetto who is very, very angry at Danish society.”
Heavily armed officers spread out on Sunday through Norrebro, where the gunman was believed to have lived, searching apartments and raiding an Internet cafe. The Danish authorities have still not officially named Mr. Hussein as the gunman who killed a Danish film director on Saturday at the cafe and a Jewish security guard at a synagogue later Sunday, wounding five police officers during the onslaught. But Mr. Hussein’s former neighbors, who have had their homes searched by the police, and others who knew the dead suspect, said Mr. Hussein was indeed the man responsible for Denmark’s worst terrorist violence since the 1980s.
Joergen Skov, a spokesman for the police said Monday the gunman had visited the cafe between the attacks on Saturday, adding that the police were looking for information from anyone who had seen him at the time. “I’m just as shocked as the rest of the world,” his distraught father, a Palestinian from Jordan, told the newspaper Jyllands Posten on Monday, adding that the first he knew of his son’s actions was when the authorities contacted him on Sunday.
“We are of course interested in whether he was alone and whether he was carrying anything and in which direction he went,” Mr. Skov said “This is not just sad, it is a tragedy,” said Anoir Hassouni, a social worker at a kick-boxing club where Mr. Hussein fought and trained for eight months before he was convicted of violent assault in 2013. He was released from prison just two weeks before the weekend attacks.
Danes responded to the attack with a mixture of regret and resolve. Mourners paid tribute to the victims by depositing flowers and candles at the sites of the killings, and Ms. Thorning-Schmidt vowed to “defend our democracy and Denmark.” The city-funded kick-boxing club, located in a former municipal garage smeared with graffiti, included many troubled youths from poor or broken homes, Mr. Hassouni said. Some drift into gangs and drugs and get involved in crime but, “They don’t do anything like this,” he added.
But the attacks, which came only weeks after a three-day onslaught in the Paris area that left 17 dead, and police raids in Belgium a week later, heightened concerns about terrorism in Europe. Denmark’s prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, said Monday that investigators so far had “no indication that he was part of a cell” and that the suspect appeared to have acted alone. The authorities say they have no evidence that the suspect ever traveled to Syria or Iraq to wage violent jihad, unlike thousands of other young European Muslims.
The gunman, identified in Danish news reports as Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, 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. While perhaps not part of an established jihadist network, the young man was clearly not alone in his anger. On Monday, about a dozen young men, their faces covered by scarves, visited the spot where Mr. Hussein died and, declaring themselves his “brothers,” shouted Allahu akbar, or God is great, as they removed flowers laid in memorial, a ritual they said was contrary to Islamic teaching.
The Copenhagen police have not publicly identified the gunman, saying only that he was 22 years old, was born and raised in Denmark, and was known to law enforcement officers because of gang-related activity and several criminal offenses linked to weapons violations and violence. In place of the flowers, they left a printed leaflet on the ground that fulminated against what they described as Denmark’s double standards, noting that Mr. Hussein’s body had been left in a pool of blood when the body of the Jewish security guard killed at the synagogue had been quickly covered. This, the leaflet said, exposed promises of equality as a fraud and showed that “religion and background make a difference.”
Copenhagen’s dense network of video surveillance cameras captured the gunman as he moved from one place to the next, and the police released several images of him on Monday. They appealed for any witnesses to come forward with information. They also taped a sign written in Danish and Arabic to the wall near the spot where Mr. Hussein died: “May Allah show mercy. Rest In Peace, Captain,” it said, using a gangland title of respect.
“We are especially interested in witnesses who observed the alleged offender regarding his whereabouts at the first crime scene,” the police said in a statement. Mr. Soei, the sociologist, said he first met Mr. Hussein as part of a group of urban youths during his research for his book, “Angry Young Men.” He said Mr. Hussein was at that time one of the core members of a gang known as the “Brothas,” a group of teenagers with little education, loose contacts to Islam, mostly through their immigrant parents, and big chips on their shoulders against a society from which they felt excluded.
There was a large gap in time between the first killing, when the gunman opened fire Saturday afternoon at a cafe that was hosting a discussion on caricatures and freedom of speech, and the slaying shortly after midnight of a Jewish man guarding the entrance to the city’s main synagogue. “He was one of the members who seemed to be the most interested and engaged,” Mr. Soei recalled. “He was willing to enter into a dialogue about questions of the gang and their behavior. He wasn’t unintelligent. When he wanted to, he could do a good job in school. But he had an enormous temper he couldn’t control.”
Copenhagen’s Jewish community has long been integrated into society, but religious leaders said that in the wake of recent attacks they had asked Danish authorities to reassess the threat level against them. On Saturday, as word spread of the attack on the cafe that killed the film director Finn Norgaard, 55, and wounded three officers, Jewish leaders requested police protection for the synagogue. Until his 2013 arrest, Mr. Hussein attended a vocational high school in the town of Hvidore, near Copenhagen, and was a “good and successful student,” said the school’s principal. Mr. Hussein spent 18 months at the school and “there was nothing to suggest” any shift toward radical Islam.
Other countries in Europe responded to the Copenhagen attacks with increased vigilance. In Germany, the authorities called off a carnival parade in the central German city of Braunschweig on Sunday, citing evidence of what they called a “specific threat of an Islamic attack.” The Swedish authorities said on Monday that they were considering raising their country’s terror alert. His temper, however, became so uncontrollable that it unnerved even his fellow gang members, who expelled him from the group. He then stabbed a commuter on a train, for which he was convicted and sent to prison.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls of France said the threat of militant attacks remained “particularly high” after the shootings in Copenhagen. He told RTL radio on Monday that exceptional security measures, which involve about 10,000 military personnel protecting public sites, would be kept in place as long as needed. Until his incarceration, religion for Mr. Hussein and fellow gang members was not so much a faith, Mr. Soei said, but “part of their identity, part of their narrative of: ‘We are outsiders because of who we are and how we look,’ but they were not praying all the time.”
Mr. Valls also vowed to protect French Jews, after more than 200 tombs were damaged at a Jewish cemetery near Strasbourg on Sunday. The Danish newspaper Berlingske reported Monday that, while in prison, Mr. Hussein spoke openly about his wish to travel to Syria to fight with the Islamic State. His remarks, the paper said, led the prison service to put his name on the list among 39 others radicalized in Danish prisons. The prison service declined to comment.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, cited the attack at the Copenhagen synagogue as further grounds for European Jews to emigrate to Israel. Following attacks in Paris last month on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery store, the French authorities have identified prison as a catalyst for radicalism. Two of the three gunmen responsible for those attacks spent time in French prisons, coming into contact with jihadist militants who turned the men’s previously tepid faith in Islam into radical zealotry.
Ms. Thorning-Schmidt rejected the Israeli leader’s call, insisting that the country’s Jewish community was an essential part of Danish society. As part of the investigation into the killings in Copenhagen, police officers on Sunday raided an Internet cafe, Power Play Reborn, in the Norrebro district where Mr. Hussein grew up and detained four young men, two of whom are still in detention.
“They belong in Denmark,” Ms. Thorning-Schmidt said on Sunday, as she laid flowers at a memorial to the slain Jewish guard, Dan Uzan, 37. “They are a strong part of our community, and we will do everything we can to protect the Jewish community in our country.” The manager of the cafe, who gave only his first name, Adeel, said the detained men “were just local punks” who spent much of their time “playing shoot’em-up games” on the Internet.
More than 10,000 people were expected to turn out for a memorial later Monday, in a response similar to the masses who took to the streets of Paris in the wake of the attacks there. Smaller vigils were to be held in other cities across the country. He said he did not know Mr. Hussein, who, according to Danish media reports, visited the Internet cafe on Saturday after the first deadly shooting in the north of the city.
Local gang members, he added, “don’t care about religion. They just want to make money and chill out.”