Terrorist Attacks by a Native Son Roil Denmark

                    After killing a Danish film director in a Saturday afternoon attack on a Copenhagen cafe and then a Jewish night guard at a synagogue, the 22-year-old gunman responsible for Denmark’s worst burst of terrorism in decades unleashed a final fusillade outside a four-story apartment building before dawn on Sunday.

Cornered by the police in a narrow street near the railway station in Norrebro, a heavily immigrant, shabby-chic district of Denmark’s capital, the Danish-born attacker opened fire and was killed in a burst of return fire, the police said.

His body fell face up on the sidewalk, said Soren Krebs, 22, an economics student who lives in the adjacent building, and it left a pool of blood that was hosed away Sunday afternoon by the fire department.

“My first feeling was just panic,” Mr. Krebs recalled, adding that he initially thought the gunfire was a battle between drug dealers. In Denmark, he said, “the first thing that comes to mind is not terrorism. This is not a problem we have had to think about much.”


After a January rampage in the Paris area killed 17 people, and police raids in Belgium a week later that the authorities said thwarted a major terrorist operation, Denmark became over the weekend the latest European country plunged into what Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt described Sunday as “a fight for freedom against a dark ideology.”

Though the gunman’s name and basic biographical details were still unclear late Sunday, he appears to have shared some traits with at least two of the militants responsible for the Paris violence, notably a criminal record and an abrupt transition from petty crime to Islamic militancy.

The Danish news media identified him as Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, but the Copenhagen police did not confirm his name. They identified him only as a 22-year-old, born and raised in Denmark, whom they knew for gang-related activity and for several criminal offenses linked to weapons violations and violence.

A Copenhagen police statement issued in November 2013 asked for help in finding a suspect by the same name who was wanted at the time in connection with a stabbing on a commuter train. The police noted then that the suspect “should be considered dangerous.”

This weekend Ms. Thorning-Schmidt, warned the usually placid nation — whose 5.6 million citizens regularly rank in opinion surveys as among the world’s happiest people — that “if a madman is willing to sacrifice his life, then we will never be able to guard ourselves 100 percent.”

Heavily armed police officers were out in force across Copenhagen, the Danish capital, on Sunday. While the authorities said the gunman appeared to be acting alone, police officers raided a number of homes and other places, including an Internet cafe. The local news media reported that at least two people had been detained, but a police spokesman, Soren Hansen, said he could not confirm any arrests.

In the Norrebro district, a search of the gunman’s apartment uncovered an automatic weapon, the spokesman said. The attacker was carrying two guns — including the weapon apparently used to kill the director and Jewish security guard — when he was shot early Sunday outside the window of Mr. Krebs, the student.

Awakened by a burst of gunfire shortly after 5 a.m., Mr. Krebs said, he looked out of his ground-floor bedroom to witness a shootout “like in a movie” and then crawled next door to the room of a fellow student, Casper Dam, who had been out late drinking and was asleep. The two terrified men took refuge in a bathroom away from the street.

Jens Madsen, the chief of Denmark’s domestic security agency, known as P.E.T., said there was no indication the gunman had traveled to Syria or Iraq as a jihadist fighter or had any connection to the two French-born brothers who attacked the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7 or a third Frenchman who, two days later, seized a Paris kosher supermarket and killed shoppers there.

But Mr. Madsen speaking to reporters at Copenhagen’s Police Headquarters on Sunday, said it was possible that the city’s attacks had been “inspired” by the Paris bloodshed.

While most Danes responded with shock to the weekend shootings, the country’s security services have been on alert against Islamic extremism since 2005, when the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad and, several months later, a Copenhagen mosque sent a mission to the Middle East to rally hostility against Denmark. Danish diplomatic missions were attacked and Danish businesses boycotted across the Muslim world.

In an editorial to be published Monday, Jyllands Posten said, “Unfortunately, it is difficult to claim surprise at the attacks in Copenhagen.” Terrorism, it added, was “not a question of if but when.”

Kurt Westergaard, who drew a cartoon for the newspaper that showed Muhammad with a bomb in a black turban, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in 2010, fleeing into a safe room at his home in the port city of Aarhus to escape a young Somali armed with an ax and a knife.