Danish police say the fatal shooting at the mall appeared to have been an indiscriminate attack

Updated July 4, 2022 at 11:17 am ET

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — 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”.

Authorities have filed preliminary murder and attempted murder charges against a 22-year-old Dane, who is being held in a secure psychiatric facility for 24 days while authorities investigate the crime, prosecutor Soren Harbo told reporters. Police said the man was known to the psychiatric service, without elaborating.

Police have not identified a motive for Sunday’s attack in one of Scandinavia’s largest shopping malls. The suspect, who was carrying a rifle and a knife, was quickly arrested and Copenhagen’s chief police inspector Søren Thomassen said the man also had access to another weapon. He said the firearms were obtained illegally but gave no further details.

“It was the worst possible nightmare,” said Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen 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.

Gun violence is relatively rare in Denmark. 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, who cannot be named by court order, was brought before a judge in a crowded courtroom on Monday to face three preliminary charges of murder and four of attempted murder. This is a step behind formal charges, but allows authorities to detain an individual pending an investigation.

The judge ordered the media to leave and held the detention hearing behind closed doors. It was not immediately clear how the suspect pleaded. He will remain in custody until July 28, police said.

Thomassen said police had no indication anyone helped the man.

“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 man 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.

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