Danish police believe a shooting at a shopping centre that left three people dead and four others seriously wounded was not terror-related. They said on Monday that the gunman acted alone and appeared to have selected his victims at random.
Copenhagen’s chief police inspector, Søren Thomassen, said the victims – a 17-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl, both Danes, and a 47-year-old Russian man – were killed when the gunman opened fire on Sunday afternoon in the Field’s shopping mall, one of Scandinavia’s biggest.
Four other people – two Danish and two Swedish citizens – were treated for gunshot wounds and were in a critical but stable condition, Thomassen said. Several other people received minor injuries as they fled the mall.
Thomassen said police had no indication that anyone helped the gunman, identified as a 22-year-old Dane. He said the motive was unclear but there was nothing suggesting terrorism, and the suspect would be arraigned later on Monday on preliminary charges of murder.
“There is nothing in our investigation, or the documents we have reviewed or the things we have found or the witnesses’ statements we have gotten, that can substantiate that this is an act of terrorism,” he said.
He confirmed that the suspect was known to mental health services but provided no further information.
The Danish broadcaster TV2 published a grainy photo of the alleged gunman, 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,” a witness, Mahdi al-Wazni, told TV2. “He spoke to me and said it [the rifle] isn’t real as I was filming him. He seemed very proud of what he was doing.”
Thomassen said that in addition to the rifle the suspect had when detained, “we also know that he has had access to a gun and that he carried a knife”.
Images from the scene showed people running out of the mall in panic. After the shooting, a big contingent of heavily armed police officers patrolled the area, and several fire department vehicles were parked outside the mall.
“It is pure terror. This is awful,” said Hans Christian Stoltz, a 53-year-old IT consultant who was bringing his daughters to see Harry Styles perform in a concert scheduled for Sunday night near the mall. “You might wonder how a person can do this to another human being, but it’s beyond anything that’s possible.”
The concert was cancelled after the shooting. On Snapchat, Styles wrote: “My team and I pray for everyone involved in the Copenhagen shopping mall shooting. I am shocked. Love H.”
It was the worst gun attack in Denmark since February 2015, when a 22-year-old man was killed in a shootout with police after going on a shooting rampage in the capital that left two people dead and five police officers wounded. That attack was believed to have been motivated by Islamic extremism.
The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, called Sunday’s shooting a “cruel attack”. She said: “It is incomprehensible. Heartbreaking. Pointless. Our beautiful and usually so safe capital was changed in a split second.”
The Field’s shopping centre is on the outskirts of Copenhagen, just across from a subway station for a line that connects the city centre with the international airport. A main road runs adjacent to the mall.
The attack came a week after a mass shooting in neighbouring Norway, where police said a Norwegian man of Iranian origin opened fire during a LGBTQ festival, killing two people and wounding more than 20.