At the shooting range in a Danish shopping center is probably nothing to do with terror, the shooter acted alone: ​​police – national

A gunman who killed three people when he opened fire in a crowded shopping center acted alone and apparently chose his victims at random, Danish police said on Monday, all but ruling out that the attack was an “act of terrorism”. was.

Police have not identified a motive for Sunday’s attack in one of Scandinavia’s largest shopping malls. A suspect, who was carrying a rifle and a knife, was quickly arrested and Copenhagen’s chief police inspector, Sren Thomassen, said the 22-year-old Dane also had access to another weapon.

He said the firearms were obtained illegally and the suspect was known to psychiatric services, but gave no further details on either.

“It was the worst nightmare possible,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said on Monday, calling the attack “unusually brutal”.

According to Thomassen, the three people killed were a 17-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl, both Danish, and a 47-year-old Russian. Four other people were hospitalized with gunshot wounds and were in critical but stable condition. A total of 30 people were injured, most in the panicked stampede after shots rang out at the Field shopping center on the outskirts of the Danish capital.

The last shooting of this magnitude was in February 2015, when a 22-year-old man was killed in a shootout with police after two people were killed and five police officers injured in the capital.

The suspect will be charged with murder later Monday. That’s a step away from bringing a formal charge, but allows authorities to hold a suspect in custody pending an investigation.

Thomassen said police had no indication anyone helped the gunman and his motive was unclear.

“There is nothing in our investigation, or the documents we reviewed, or the things we found, or the testimonies we received that can prove this is an act of terrorism,” said Thomassen, who previously identified the suspect as “ethnic Dane,” a term typically used to mean someone is white.

Danish broadcaster TV2 released a grainy photo of the suspected shooter, a man wearing knee-length shorts, a vest or sleeveless shirt and holding what appears to be a gun in his right hand.

“He seemed very violent and angry,” eyewitness Mahdi Al-Wazni told TV2. “He spoke to me and said it (the gun) isn’t real when I was filming him. He seemed very proud of what he was doing.”

Pictures from the scene showed people running from the mall where people were laying 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, her sister and her father thought it was because someone had spotted Styles — but she soon realized the panic, including a man retrieving his child from a stroller in the chaos.

“People led us to the exit sign, and we ran up the roof and we were stuck there for a while, and then people everywhere were panicking and people were crying,” Stoltz said.

The Styles concert was canceled because of the shooting.

Sunday’s attack came about a week after a shooting in neighboring Norway in which police said a Norwegian of Iranian descent opened fire during an LGBTQ festival, killing two people and injuring more than 20.

— Ritter reports from Unterseen, Switzerland.