Denmark saw no signs of planned attacks
Despite a warning from prison authorities that the gunman behind a weekend shooting spree in Copenhagen was at risk of being radicalized in jail, Danish intelligence officials insisted Tuesday they had no reason to believe he was plotting attacks after his release.
Omar Abdel Hamid El- Hussein was killed in a shootout with a SWAT team early Sunday after attacks on a free speech event and a synagogue that killed two people and wounded five.
The Danish Security and Intelligence Service, known by its Danish acronym PET, acknowledged that the 22- year- old gunman was flagged in September under a program meant to alert PET to “inmates who are at risk of radicalization.”
El- Hussein, a Denmark native with Palestinian parents, was in pre- trial detention at the time for seriously wounding a train passenger in a knife attack, court documents show.
What prompted prison authorities to sound the alarm is unclear, but PET said that the information gave the agency no reason to believe the perpetrator “was planning attacks.”
“We are in the middle of an investigation with many aspects, many things to look into, there are lots of unanswered questions right now,” PET chief Jens Madsen said Tuesday.
The Danish Parliament opened Tuesday with a minute of silence for the victims of the shooting attacks. A Danish documentary filmmaker and a Jewish security guard died and five police officers were wounded in the weekend shootings before the gunman was killed.
Authorities have said the gunman may have been inspired by last month’s terror attacks by Islamic extremists in Paris. But Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said there was no indication he was part of a wider cell, and no known terrorist group has taken responsibility for the attacks.
France, meanwhile, is tracking hundreds of people believed to belong to possible sleeper cells for terror organizations like al- Qaida or the Islamic State group.
“Four hundred targets have been identified by our intelligence services that are more or less sleeper cells, affiliated or in relation with al- Qaida- type organizations, that can strike like the Kouachi brothers,” French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Monday night.
Cherif and Said Kouachi were French- born brothers who killed 12 people in Paris on Jan. 7 when they stormed the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. They were shot dead by police in a confrontation two days later.
Cazeneuve said he wants new measures to give intelligence services more leeway to monitor suspects’ electronic communications. He is heading to the United States on Wednesday to try and persuade Internet giants to step up and help stem extremists’ ability to use propaganda videos to recruit and indoctrinate new followers.
Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Google — all major vectors for increasingly sophisticated jihadi clips targeting potential followers in the West — will be among his stops in Silicon Valley.
“Ninety per cent of those who commit terrorist acts fall into it after regularly consulting websites or blogs that call for or provoke terrorism,” Cazeneuve said.
Four hundred targets have been identified by our intelligence services that are more or less sleeper cells … .