COPENHAGEN – An armed man who killed three people when he opened fire in a crowded shopping center acted alone and apparently selected his victims at random, Danish police said on Monday, but ruled out that the attack was a “terrorist act”.
The police have not identified any motive for Sunday’s attack in one of Scandinavia’s largest shopping centers. A suspect carrying a rifle and a knife was quickly arrested and Copenhagen’s chief police inspector Søren Thomassen said that the 22-year-old Danish man also had access to another pistol.
He said the weapons were obtained illegally and that the suspect was known to the mental health service but gave no further details about either.
“It was the worst nightmare imaginable,” said Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on Monday, calling the attack “unusually brutal.”
3 dead, 3 seriously injured in shooting at Denmark Mall
The three killed were a 17-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl, both Danes, and a 47-year-old Russian man, according to Thomassen. Another four people were taken to hospital with gunshot wounds and were in critical but stable condition. A total of 30 people were injured, most in the panic after the shots rang in the Field’s shopping center, on the outskirts of the Danish capital.
The most recent shooting on this scale was in February 2015, when a 22-year-old man was killed in a shooting with the police after an attack in the capital that killed two people and injured five policemen.
The suspect arrived at a hearing in a packed courtroom, where he is expected to face three preliminary charges of murder and four of attempted murder, according to Danish media. Preliminary prosecutions are one step smaller than filing formal charges but allow authorities to keep a suspect in custody during an investigation. He can not be named according to a court decision, media reported.
Thomassen said that the police had no indications that anyone helped the perpetrator, and his motive is still unclear.
“There is nothing in our investigation, or the documents we have examined, or the things we have found, or the statements of the witnesses we have received, that can prove that this is an act of terrorism,” said Thomassen, who previously identified the suspect as “ethnic Danish. “, a phrase commonly used to mean someone is white.
Danish TV2 published a grainy photo of the alleged armed man, a man wearing knee-length shorts, a vest or sleeveless shirt and holding what appeared to be a rifle in his right hand.
– He seemed very violent and angry, says eyewitness Mahdi Al-Wazni to TV2. “He talked to me and said so [the rifle] is not real when I filmed him. He seemed very proud of what he was doing. ‘
Pictures from the site showed people running out of the mall, where people laid flowers on Monday.
Chassandra Stoltz, an 18-year-old student who was on her way to a Harry Styles concert 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 taking his child from a pram in the chaos.
“People guided us towards the exit sign and we ran up to the roof and we were stuck there for a while and then people panicked everywhere and people cried,” Stoltz said.
The Styles concert was canceled due to the shooting.
Sunday’s attack came about a week after a shooting in neighboring Norway, where police said that a Norwegian man of Iranian origin opened fire during an LGBTQ festival and killed two and injured more than 20.
Source: sn.dk