Danish police report they arrested two men believed to have helped the terrorist who attacked a Copenhagen cafe and a synagogue with gunfire on Saturday, Feb. 14.
The suspected terrorist was killed in a gun battle with a Danish SWAT team on Sunday. The suspect has been identified as Omar Abdel Hamid el-Hussein, age 22, born and raised in Denmark, The Telegraph reported.
Hussein opened fire on a cafe while a seminar on free speech was taking place on Saturday. One man was killed and several police officers were wounded. Inside the Krudttoenden cafe was Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, best known for his 2007 Mohammad-headed dog drawings. Vilks’s drawings had incited cultural warfare, with Islamists threatening repeatedly to kill him, and free speech advocates insisting that the message may be unpleasant but it should be protected speech.
Agnieszka Kolek, a Polish artist and free-speech activist who was present inside the cafe during the attack told a Wall Street Journal reporter that although those inside the cafe could not see outside, they could hear him yelling. Kolek said, “we heard him shout ‘Allahu akbar.’”
The terrorist escaped from the scene of the cafe shooting, and later in the day is believed to have been the same one who (non-randomly) opened fire outside a Copenhagen synagogue, inside of which a bat mitzvah was taking place. Dan Uzen, a 37-year-old Jewish man who was volunteering as a security guard outside of the shul, was shot in the head and died. Two officers were also wounded in this terrorist attack.
The arrested suspects will have a custody hearing on Monday, Feb. 16.
The fact that there were accomplices makes the whole “lone wolf” theory – the one that is so often trotted out in the immediate aftermath of most terrorist attacks – look rabid.