Police: Motive likely not terror-related in Copenhagen shooting
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — A gunman who killed three people when he opened fire in a crowded shopping mall acted alone and apparently selected his victims at random, Danish police said Monday, all but ruling out that the attack was related to terrorism.
Authorities filed preliminary charges of murder and attempted murder against a 22-year-old Danish man, who will be held for 24 days in a secure mental health facility while authorities investigate the crime, prosecutor Soren Harbo told reporters.
Police have said the man was known to mental health service without elaborating.
Police have not identified a motive for Sunday’s attack inside one of Scandinavia’s biggest shopping centers. The suspect, carrying a rifle and knife, was quickly arrested, and Copenhagen chief police inspector Soren Thomassen said the man also had access to another gun. He said the firearms were obtained illegally but gave no further details.
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. Four more people were hospitalized with gunshot wounds and were in critical but stable condition. In all, around two dozen people were hurt, most in the panicked stampede after the shots rang out at the Field’s shopping center on the outskirts of the Danish capital.
Gun violence is relatively rare in Denmark. The last shooting on 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 police officers wounded.
The suspect, who cannot be named by court order, was brought before a judge Monday in a packed courtroom to face three preliminary charges of murder and four of attempted murder. That’s a step short of formal charges but allow authorities to keep a person in custody during an investigation.
Thomassen has identified the man as an “ethnic Dane,” a phrase typically used to describe someone who is white.
Deadly Italy avalanche:
Thunderstorms hampered the search Monday for more than a dozen hikers who remained unaccounted for a day after a huge chunk of an Alpine glacier in northeast Italy broke off, sending an avalanche of ice, snow and rocks down the slope. Officials put the known death toll at seven.
A regional leader, Maurizio Fugatti, said 14 people remained unaccounted for Monday afternoon: 10 Italians, three from the Czech Republic and one from Austria. One of the Italians was Filippo Bari, 28, who snapped a selfie with the Marmolada glacier in the background only minutes before the avalanche, his brother, Andrea, told state TV.
The avalanche came roaring down when dozens of hikers were on excursions, including some of them roped together.
The Marmolada glacier has been shrinking for decades, and scientists at the government CNR research center have said it won’t exist within 25-30 years.
Navy offers cash for tips:
The U.S. Navy’s Mideastbased 5th Fleet is starting to offer rewards for information that could help sailors intercept weapons, drugs and other illicit shipments across the region amid tensions over Iran’s nuclear program and Tehran’s arming of Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
While avoiding directly mentioning Iran, the 5th Fleet’s decision to offer cash and other goods for actionable intelligence in the Persian Gulf and other strategic waterways may increase pressure on the flow of weapons to the Houthis as a shaky cease-fire still holds in Yemen.
The 5th Fleet says it and its partners seized $500 million in drugs alone in 2021 — more than the four prior years combined. The 5th Fleet also intercepted 9,000 weapons in the same period, three times the number seized in 2020.
Cmdr. Timothy Hawkins, a 5th Fleet spokesman, said operators fluent in Arabic, English and Farsi would man a hotline, while the Navy also would take tips additionally online, in Dari and Pashto. Payouts can be as high as $100,000 or the equivalent in vehicles, boats or food for tips that also include information on planned attacks targeting Americans, Hawkins said.
New Zealand launch: A satellite the size of a microwave oven successfully broke free from its orbit around Earth on Monday and is headed toward the moon, the latest step in NASA’S plan to land astronauts on the lunar surface again.
The Capstone satellite was launched six days ago from New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula by the company Rocket Lab in one of their small Electron rockets. It will take another four months for the satellite to reach the moon, as it cruises along using minimal energy.
Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck said the relatively low cost of the mission — NASA put it at $32.7 million — marked the beginning of a new era for space exploration.
“For some tens of millions of dollars, there is now a rocket and a spacecraft that can take you to the moon, to asteroids, to Venus, to Mars,” Beck said. “It’s an insane capability that’s never existed before.”
Former Nazi guard appeals:
A 101-year-old man convicted last week as an accessory to murder for serving as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II has appealed, a German court said Monday.
The man, whom local media have identified as Josef S., was convicted last Tuesday of more than 3,500 counts of accessory to murder and sentenced to five years in prison.
He had denied working as an SS guard at the Sachsenhausen camp and aiding and abetting the murder of thousands of prisoners. But the Neuruppin state court concluded that he did in fact work at the camp on the outskirts of Berlin between 1942 and 1945 as an enlisted member of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing.
China ship sinking: Rescue teams searching for missing crew members from a Chinese engineering ship that sank over the weekend saved a fourth person on Monday and recovered 12 bodies, Chinese maritime authorities said.
Officials said the crew member rescued by a Chinese navy ship on Monday was in stable condition. Three other members of the 30-person crew were rescued Saturday.
The bodies were found about 50 nautical miles southwest of the area in which the vessel Fujing 001 sank, authorities in the southeastern province of Guangdong said. Officials were attempting to identify the bodies.
The China-registered floating crane was involved in building several offshore wind farms and sank about 180 miles southwest of Hong Kong.