COPENHAGEN, Denmark – A gunman who killed three people when he opened fire on a crowded shopping mall acted alone and apparently selected his victims at random, Danish police said on Monday, but he rule out that the attack was an “act of terrorism.”
Authorities have filed preliminary murder and attempted murder charges against a 22-year-old Dane, who will be detained for 24 days in a safe mental health center while authorities investigate the crime, prosecutor Sren Harbo told reporters . Police said the man was known to the mental health service without giving further details.
Police have not identified the cause of Sunday’s attack inside one of Scandinavia’s largest shopping malls. The suspect, who was carrying a rifle and a knife, was quickly arrested and Copenhagen police chief inspector Sren Thomassen said the man also had access to another weapon. He said the firearms were obtained illegally but gave no further details.
“It was the worst nightmare possible,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said on Monday, calling the attack “unusually brutal”.
The three murders were a 17-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl, both Danes, and a 47-year-old Russian man, according to Thomassen. Four more people were hospitalized with gunshot wounds and were in critical but stable condition. A total of 30 people were injured, most in a panic after gunfire erupted at the Field shopping center on the outskirts of the Danish capital.
Armed violence is relatively rare in Denmark. The last shooting of this scale was in February 2015, when a 22-year-old man was killed in a shootout with police after an attack in the capital that left two people dead and five policemen injured.
The suspect, who cannot be appointed by court order, was brought before a judge on Monday in a courtroom full of plaintiffs to face three preliminary murder charges and four attempted murder charges. This is a step below formal charges, but allows authorities to keep a person in custody during an investigation.
The judge asked the media to leave and held the arrest hearing behind closed doors. It was not immediately clear how the suspect begged. Police will remain in custody until July 28.
Thomassen said police had no clues that anyone was helping the man.
“There is nothing in our investigation, or in the documents we have reviewed, or in the things we have found, or in the statements of the witnesses we have received, that can prove that this is an act of terrorism.” said Thomassen, who previously identified the man as “ethnic Dane,” a phrase commonly used to mean someone is white.
The Danish station TV2 published a grainy photograph of the alleged gunman, a man in knee-length shorts, a vest or a sleeveless T-shirt and with what appeared to be a rifle in his right hand.
“He looked very violent and angry,” eyewitness Mahdi Al-Wazni told TV2. “He spoke to me and said that (the rifle) is not real while I was filming it. He seemed very proud of what he was doing.”
Images of the scene showed people running outside the mall, where people laid flowers on Monday.
Chassandra Stoltz, an 18-year-old student on her way to a Harry Styles concert that was scheduled for Sunday night nearby, described a stampede when the shots rang out. At first, she and her sister and father thought it was because someone had seen Styles, but she soon realized the panic, including a man grabbing her son from a stroller in the middle of the chaos.
“People were guiding us to the exit sign, we ran up the roof and we were stuck there for a while and then people panicked all over and people were crying,” Stoltz said.
Styles’ concert was canceled due to the shooting.
Sunday’s attack came about a week after a shooting in neighboring Norway, where police said a Norwegian man of Iranian descent opened fire during an LGBTQ festival, killing two and injuring more than 20.
—
Ritter reported from Unterseen, Switzerland.
Copyright © 2022 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved.